How to allow a “/” character in a route parameter¶

Sometimes, you need to compose URLs with parameters that can contain a slash /. For example, take the classic /hello/{name} route. By default, /hello/Fabien will match this route but not /hello/Fabien/Kris. This is because Symfony uses this character as separator between route parts.

This guide covers how you can modify a route so that /hello/Fabien/Kris matches the /hello/{name} route, where {name} equals Fabien/Kris.

Configure the Route¶

By default, the symfony routing components requires that the parameters match the following regex pattern: [^/]+. This means that all characters are allowed except /.

You must explicitly allow / to be part of your parameter by specifying a more permissive regex pattern.

YAML

_hello:
    pattern: /hello/{name}
    defaults: { _controller: AcmeDemoBundle:Demo:hello }
    requirements:
        name: ".+"

XML

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

<routes xmlns="http://symfony.com/schema/routing"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://symfony.com/schema/routing http://symfony.com/schema/routing/routing-1.0.xsd">

    <route id="_hello" pattern="/hello/{name}">
        <default key="_controller">AcmeDemoBundle:Demo:hello</default>
        <requirement key="name">.+</requirement>
    </route>
</routes>

PHP

use Symfony\Component\Routing\RouteCollection;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Route;

$collection = new RouteCollection();
$collection->add('_hello', new Route('/hello/{name}', array(
    '_controller' => 'AcmeDemoBundle:Demo:hello',
), array(
    'name' => '.+',
)));

return $collection;

Annotations

use Sensio\Bundle\FrameworkExtraBundle\Configuration\Route;

class DemoController
{
    /**
     * @Route("/hello/{name}", name="_hello", requirements={"name" = ".+"})
     */
    public function helloAction($name)
    {
        // ...
    }
}

That’s it! Now, the {name} parameter can contain the / character.