How to use : colon char in Bottle route - bottle

Question

I have simple Bottle route, and URL should contain : (colon) sign. URL should be like /REST/item:128 or /REST/item:89753
My route is
#route('/REST/item:<id:int>')
def icc(id):
return { 'id': id }
Route is not working properly. id contain only last char from url id, not full id.
How to use : (colon) in route?

Answer 1

Wow, this was confusing.
I haven't had time to fully understand what's happening, but I suspect that one of Bottle's route regexes is eating too many characters when there's a colon in the route.
In any case, escaping the colon with a backslash appears to solve the problem:
#route(r'/REST/item\:<id_:int>') # note the "r" prefix there
def icc(id_):
return {'id': id_}
Here's a test request and its response:
=> curl -v 'http://127.0.0.1:8080/REST/item:123'
{"id": 123}
EDIT: Mystery solved.
Bottle currently supports two syntaxes for url wildcards: The
one (since 0.10) and the :old syntax. Both are described here:
http://bottlepy.org/docs/dev/routing.html
In your example, the : triggered the old syntax. The solution is to
escape the colon with a backslash (as described in the SO answer).
Escaping is fully implemented and works as intended, but is
undocumented. This is why I leave this issue open. Pull requests for
better documentation would be welcomed.