Make meaning of parentheses for regex explicit in URL Pattern API

[tunetheweb]

Description

A URLPattern uses parentheses to define Regexs as shown in one fo the examples currently on MDN:

const pattern = new URLPattern("/books/:id(\\d+)", "https://example.com");

Here the (\\d+) is a regex as it's surrounded by parentheses. However it's not obvious that parentheses are what allow you to use regular expressions since they are so common (especially in regexes themselves when they defined groups) so this is easily missed. So I'm suggesting wording to make this more explicit.

Motivation

I didn't understand this and wasted a lot of time on it. I'm hoping to avoid others doing the same.

Additional details

I also raised an issue for the spec to see if they want to make it clearer too:
whatwg/urlpattern#229

Related issues and pull requests

[github-actions]

Preview URLs

• /en-US/docs/Web/API/URL_Pattern_API

(comment last updated: 2024-08-23 17:31:56)