Routing is the process of determining what should happen when a URL is called, or also which parts of the application should handle a specific incoming request.

In the Hello World example we used this code

app.get('/', (req, res) => { /* */ })

This creates a route that maps accessing the root domain URL / using the HTTP GET method to the response we want to provide.

Named parameters

What if we want to handle custom requests—for example, a service that accepts a string and returns it in uppercase—and we don’t want the parameter in the query string but in the URL path? We use named parameters:

app.get('/uppercase/:theValue', (req, res) => res.send(req.params.theValue.toUpperCase()))

If we send a request to /uppercase/test, we’ll get TEST in the body of the response.

You can use multiple named parameters in the same URL, and they will all be stored in req.params.

Use a regular expression to match a path

You can use regular expressions to match multiple paths with one statement:

app.get(/post/, (req, res) => { /* */ })

will match /post, /post/first, /thepost, /posting/something, and so on.

Lessons in this unit:

0:	Introduction
1:	Introduction to Express
2:	Request parameters
3:	Send a response to the client
4:	Send a JSON response
5:	Manage cookies
6:	Work with HTTP headers
7:	Handling redirects
8:	▶︎ Routing
9:	Template engines
10:	Middleware
11:	Serving Static Assets with Express
12:	Send files to the client
13:	Sessions
14:	Validating and sanitizing input
15:	Handling form data
16:	Handling CORS
17:	HTTPS with a self-signed certificate
18:	HTTPS with Let's Encrypt
19:	Handling file uploads
20:	Build a REST API with MongoDB