Hi all, I had this in my Dancer code: get '/instance/?:id?' => sub { my $id = param('id'); ... }; That let's me do this: http://localhost:5000/instance # get a list of instances http://localhost:5000/instance/ # get a list of instances http://localhost:5000/instance/213 # get instance 213 However, after I typoed a URL, I discovered that it would also match: http://localhost:5000/instances # get instance 's' This is because of the generated regex: /^\/instance\/?([^\/]+)?$/ I've fixed this by switching to regex paths, but I would argue for the following to be the regex generated from my example above: /^\/instance(?:\/([^\/]+))?$/ In other words, if you have multiple "optional" components in a path, they are all required up to, but excluding, the last optional component found in the URL that is accessed. You could then safely visit /instance, /instance/, and /instance/42. This would allow the easy construction of things like this: /member/?:member_id?/?:tag_id? Allowing you to access: /member /member/ /member/3 /member/3/ /member/3/7 This would make it easy to write the sort of URLs that I often write. Speculation: at that point, if we have an optional component, we could *assume* that the preceding / must be optional (?), leading to a simple URL: /member/:member_id?/:tag_id? Once something optional is found, nothing after it may be mandatory (otherwise, if you had optional items collapsing out of the URL, it would be a semantic mess that's impossible to sort through). Thoughts? Cheers, Ovid -- Live and work overseas - http://www.overseas-exile.com/ Buy the book - http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlhks/ Tech blog - http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/ Twitter - http://twitter.com/OvidPerl/