Do not use capturing groups when unnecessary in URLs
Review Request #10273 — Created Oct. 24, 2018 and submitted
Given a URL pattern of the form
((?P<capture>[a-z]+)/)?, a call to
reverse with the kwargs{'capture': 'foo'}will result in a
NoReverseMatchexception. This occurs because thecaptureparam gets
hidden behind a positional parameter and Django will expect the
positional parameter intead of the named parameter for the call to
reverse. We now no longer use capturing groups -- we explicltly mark the
outer group as non-capturing (e.g.(?:(?P<capture>[a-z]+)/)?, which
works as expected.We previously were also using capturing groups in the form of
?(P<capture>(a|b)). Not only will a non-capturing group work here, the
group isn't needed at all: a expression of the form(?P<capture>a|b)
is sufficient. All instances of this have been fixed.
- Ran unit tests.
- Viewed the diff fragment view for an interdiff.
- Viewed the e-mail preview views in html and text formats.
| Description | From | Last Updated | 
|---|---|---|
| Typo in the description: "paramter" -> "parameter" |  | 
- Description:
- 
    Given a URL pattern of the form ((?P<capture>[a-z]+)/)?, a call toreverse with the kwargs {'capture': 'foo'}will result in aNoReverseMatchexception. This occurs because thecaptureparam gets~ hidden behind a positional paramter and Django will expect the ~ hidden behind a positional parameter and Django will expect the positional parameter intead of the named parameter for the call to reverse. We now no longer use capturing groups -- we explicltly mark the outer group as non-capturing (e.g. (?:(?P<capture>[a-z]+)/)?, whichworks as expected. We previously were also using capturing groups in the form of ?(P<capture>(a|b)). Not only will a non-capturing group work here, thegroup isn't needed at all: a expression of the form (?P<capture>a|b)is sufficient. All instances of this have been fixed. 
