UrlRouter

UrlRouter is a simple router that can be used to provide navigation in Javascript applications.

The router lets you define the patterns for url matching, and also allows you to name the variable sections so that the handler can easily access these.

This is an example of a set of rules:

var rules = [
    [
        "/:user_name/status/:action/", 
        function(data){
            console.log(data.user_name + ": " + data.action);
    	}
    ], [
        "/:user_name/settings/", 
        function(data){
            console.log(data.user_name);
        }
    ], [
    	"/inbox/", 
    	function(data){
            console.log(data);
        }
    ]
];

Note how all :foo strings acts as placeholders resulting in matching properties on the data object.

To use these we simply create a new UrlRouter and call the compile method

var router = new UrlRouter(rules);
router.compile();

Now we can do things like

window.onhashchange = function() {
	router.match(location.hash); // returns the data object if successfull, undefined if not.
}

If the router finds a successfull match, it will first execute its corresponding handler, passing an object with the variables present as properties, and it will then return the data object itself.

It is important that the rules are sorted in order so that the most specific rule comes first, eg "/user/:username" and then "/user/".