In a django online course, the instructor has us use the url() function to call views and utilize regular expressions in the urlpatterns list. I've seen other examples on youtube of this.
e.g.
from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import include
from django.conf.urls import url
urlpatterns = [
path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
url(r'^polls/', include('polls.urls')),
]
#and in polls/urls.py
urlpatterns = [
url(r'^$', views.index, name="index"),
]
However, in going through the Django tutorial, they use path() instead e.g.:
from django.urls import path
from . import views
urlpatterns = [
path('', views.index, name="index"),
]
Furthermore regular expressions don't seem to work with the path() function as using a path(r'^$', views.index, name="index") won't find the mysite.com/polls/ view.
Is using path() without regex matching the proper way going forward? Is url() more powerful but more complicated so they're using path() to start us out with? Or is it a case of different tools for different jobs?
From Django documentation for url
url(regex, view, kwargs=None, name=None)This function is an alias todjango.urls.re_path(). It’s likely to be deprecated in a future release.
Key difference between path and re_path is that path uses route without regex
You can use re_path for complex regex calls and use just path for simpler lookups
The new django.urls.path() function allows a simpler, more readable URL routing syntax. For example, this example from previous Django releases:
url(r'^articles/(?P<year>[0-9]{4})/$', views.year_archive)
could be written as:
path('articles/<int:year>/', views.year_archive)
The django.conf.urls.url() function from previous versions is now available as django.urls.re_path(). The old location remains for backwards compatibility, without an imminent deprecation. The old django.conf.urls.include() function is now importable from django.urls so you can use:
from django.urls import include, path, re_path
in the URLconfs. For further reading django doc
path is simply new in Django 2.0, which was only released a couple of weeks ago. Most tutorials won't have been updated for the new syntax.
It was certainly supposed to be a simpler way of doing things; I wouldn't say that URL is more powerful though, you should be able to express patterns in either format.