As the web transitioned to dynamic pages, the concept of the URL path evolved. With a static server, the path indicates an actual file that exists on the fileserver. But with dynamic pages, the url doesn’t have to correspond to anything real. Consider the case of Placeholder.com, a service that offers image URLs you can use in a site layout to simulate images. For example, the image below is generated by the site by using the URL By using the URL //via.placeholder.com/350x150:

Does Placeholder.com have thousands of images of varying sizes stored on a disk somewhere? No! It generates the image data dynamically based on the request - here it reads the 350x150 and uses it to determine the size of the image needed. It also reads other aspects of the URL and uses those to set other aspects, i.e. the url //via.placeholder.com/350x150/C497FF/FFFFFF?text=Hello generates the image:

Clearly, we’re conveying information to the Placeholder.com server through the url. This is much like passing parameters to a function - it is how we communicate what we want the server to do with our request!

Let’s revisit our blog server. What if we adopted a similar approach there? Our URLs might then look like:

• http://my-blog.com/posts/0-hello-web
• http://my-blog.com/posts/1-a-rose-by-any-other-name
• http://my-blog.com/posts/40-another-day

Where we use the entire title as part of the URL! This makes it more human-readable, especially helpful when searching your browser history or scanning bookmarks. But how would we handle this approach in our handleRequest()? You might recognize that we have a reoccurring pattern, which of course suggests we try a RegExp:

public handleRequest(req, res) {
    
    // Separate the pathname from the url 
    const pathname = new URL(req.url, "http://localhost").pathname;

    // Determine if the request is for the index page
    if(pathname === '/') return serveHome(req, res);

    // Determine if the request is for a post 
    if(\$/post/\w+^\g.test(pathname)) return servePost(req, res);

    // Treat all other requests as a file 
    serveFile(req, res);
}

With this regular expression, we’ve effectively built a wildcard into our URL. Any URL with a pattern /posts/[postname] will be treated as a post!