Using pattern matching in Low Seg2Cat

Question

I need to get the IDs of particular segments in the URL, shown in bold (i.e. segments 2, 3 and 4):

/grid/strategic/corporate/uk/jim/tweets

They could also look like this (i.e. no category has been set):

/grid/-/-/-/jim/tweets

I'm assuming I would need a regex pattern match to do this and then use the {segment_category_ids} tag to pull them out in a list such as 37&342.

Not entirely sure how I should go about writing that for the settings though. I tried this:

^/[a-z-_0-9]*/[a-z-_0-9]*/[a-z-_0-9]*/[a-z-_0-9]*

Which works OK in a regexp checker but the I find that the tag {segment_category_ids} doesn't get rendered in the template.

How should I be providing this in the settings?

Answer 1

The regex option in Low Seg2Cat's settings is meant for something else: when set Low Seg2Cat will only set the {segment_n_category_x} variables when the URI matches the given pattern.

I take it you want to have access to those vars in all cases, so you should leave it blank.

If you do want to use the regex option, make sure you also add the delimiters to the pattern. In your case, that would mean the pattern could look something like this:

#^(/[\w-]+){4}$#

Answer 2

With LowSeg2 Cat could you do...

{if segment_2!="-"}{segment_2_category_id}&{/if}
{if segment_3!="-"}{segment_3_category_id}&{/if}
{if segment_4!="-"}{segment_4_category_id}{/if} {!-- No & here because it's the last segment --}

That should do the job.