Option to disable regex in replace filter

[ghost]

Hi Folks,

Following on from an issue I posted yesterday, I have been thinking about whether it is a good idea to have the replace filter acting as both str_replace and preg_replace (which is how it currently works).

The impetus for the above issue was actually due to some existing code breaking after updating to Craft 4.5.x

The goal of the existing code was to remove a path segment such as /a/ from a URL, including the surrounding slashes. The code looked like something like this:

{% set url = 'https://example.com/a/' %}

{% set urlWithoutPath = url|replace({'/a/': ''}) %}

Previously that would set urlWithoutPath to 'https://example.com'.

Since updating to Craft 4.5, this instead removes all instances of the 'a' character from the string, thus resulting in urlWithoutPath being set to https://exmple.com//.

While this is technically the expected behaviour since the new version supports a regex, it is a bit of a breaking change in a sense, since the replace interface is no longer backwards compatible with our (valid) use-case.

The pattern kindly provided by @wsydney76 in that issue, /\\/a\\//, does work, but seems quite an inelegant/ugly solution when a str_replace would simply need /a/.

I've been trying to think about ways of preventing similar unexpected behaviour in future. Perhaps an option on the replace filter to disable the regex matching would help prevent confusion, and also avoid us having to use hard-to-read regex patterns.

Thoughts?

[brandonkelly]

Sorry, that was an unintended change in behavior.

I’ve just added a new regex argument to the |replace filter for the next release, which you can set to false to explicitly disable regex parsing:

{% set url = 'https://example.com/a/' %}

{% set urlWithoutPath = url|replace({'/a/': ''}, regex=false) %}

[ghost]

Perfect, thanks very much Brandon!

[brandonkelly]

Craft 4.5.4 is out with that change.