I am trying to set up my web.xml in Tomcat 4.1.3 container to go to one page if letters are entered in last part of url or go to another page if numbers are entered in the last part of a url.

For example if here is how the url would be set up where the url will go to either the all numbers location or the non numbers location:

Any number entry for last part of url which could be something like 343
http://127.0.0.1:8080/theapp/pack/weburl/343

Any non number entry for last part of url which could be something like abec
http://127.0.0.1:8080/theapp/pack/weburl/abec

My attempt below is not working because it doesnt seem to take the regular expressions. But if I manually put in letters such as: <url-pattern>/pack/weburl/ab</url-pattern> it would take me to the correct page. How does web.xml work with regular expressions inthe url-pattern tag??

<servlet>
<servlet-name>Number</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>pack.Number</servlet-class>
</servlet>
 
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>Number</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/pack/weburl/\d*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
 
<servlet>
<servlet-name>NotNumber</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>pack.NotNumber</servlet-class>
</servlet>
 
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>NotNumber</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/pack/weburl/[A-Za-z]</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

 

 

Sorry, this pattern can't take regular expressions.

Referring to the servlet spec section 11.2 which defines these mappings

In the web application deployment descriptor, the following syntax is used to define

mappings:

? A string beginning with a ?/? character and ending with a ?/? postfix is used

for path mapping.

? A string beginning with a ?.? prefix is used as an extension mapping.

? A string containing only the ?/? character indicates the "default" servlet of the

application. In this case the servlet path is the request URI minus the context

path and the path info is null.

? All other strings are used for exact matches only.

As an alternative, I would suggest that you match the request to a filter, and then use some logic based on request.getURI() to determine which resource to forward to from there.

 

 

If you're looking for something like Apache mod_rewrite, I'd suggest you to take a look here: http://tuckey.org/urlrewrite/

Then you can configure this to redirect all numbered requests to /webapp/numberservlet and all non-numbered requests to /webapp/nonnumberservlet, which you can define in the web.xml then.