Document various URL patterns (colon, asterisk etc.)

[silvenon]

In #2202 it took me a while to figure out how to use MSW with SuperTest. It's making requests to random ports, which MSW is reporting as warnings/errors because they hadn't been intercepted. The goal is to tell MSW to ignore them, because those are requests to our own app.

It's clear that MSW has a parameter component of the URL preceded by the colon, but it seems to also supports an asterisk as a catch-all, which is what I was looking for in this case. However, I seem to have unfortunately combined both of them by preceding the asterisk with the colon and achieved a result that I didn't understand 😬

Luckily, after removing the colon everything worked as expected. I believe URL patterns should be documented in a way that makes it clear to people how to deal with situations like SuperTest.

Btw, did I stumble upon a bug? I guess URL matching can't really recognize ports vs. params when the URL is not finished.

[kettanaito]

Hi, @silvenon. Thanks for raising this!

I believe we do mention the documentation for it. MSW uses a package called path-to-regexp, which has become the standard for path matching in JavaScript (used in Express, lies in the foundation of the upcoming URLPattern standard API).

Please read that package's README to learn about the supported special tokens when defining paths. Thanks!

[kettanaito]

Btw, did I stumble upon a bug? I guess URL matching can't really recognize ports vs. params when the URL is not finished.

This does sound like a bug though. Can you please open a new issue for this?

[silvenon]

Ah, indeed, there it is, I missed it! 🙂

I raised the wildcard bug separately in #2204 if anyone wants to follow.