Using colon as a character instead of path parameter (express 5)

[Tanavya]

Discussed in #5609

^{Originally posted by Tanavya April 18, 2024}
I am trying to follow google's API design guide here for custom methods https://cloud.google.com/apis/design/custom_methods. I already looked through the discussion here #3857 but it did not solve my problem.

On express version 5.0.0-beta.3.

This works

router.get('/tasks/:id/([:])action', async (req, res, _next) => {
    const id = req.params["id"];
    return res.status(200).send(id);
  });

So I can do a simple GET on tasks/50/:action

However, the moment I remove the / it breaks.

router.get('/tasks/:id([:])action', async (req, res, _next) => {
    const id = req.params["id"];
    return res.status(200).send(id);
});

GET /tasks/50:action -> not found.

How do I solve this?

[Tanavya]

Oh interestingly, after some hit and trial I figured it out. Looks like this works:

router.get("/tasks/:id\\:action", async (req, res, _next) => {
  const id = req.params["id"];
  return res.status(200).send(id);
});

Now GET /tasks/50:action returns 200
Definitely documentation can be improved for this though.