Laravel Limit route parameter dynamically (but only show valid urls) - php

Question

I cannot wrap my mind around something.
I have a table which I render in my tables.blade.php file like this:
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th scope="col">Country</th>
<th scope="col">Member</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
#foreach ($members as $member)
#if ($member->continent == 'Europe')
<tr>
<td>
{{ $member->country }}
</td>
<td class="align-middle player-code copy-code">
{{ $member->name }}
</td>
</tr>
#endif
#endforeach
</tbody>
</table>
As you can see you can click on a country which will show you members from one country in a new view (code not shown here).
The route for that single country site in the web.php looks like this:
Route::get('/{country}', 'PageController#show')->name('country');
Everything worked fine until I realized that I could put anything as 'country' and still would get shown the site for the country just with an empty table.
So '/abcde' would get you the view with just a naked table.
So I changed the route like this:
Route::get('/{country}', 'PageController#show')->name('country')->where('country', ('United Kingdom|France|Belgium|South Africa);
//the list is much longer
Ok. So now I have constrained the 'country'-parameter in a pretty static way. And I have the feeling that is not the way it should be done. Because in the end I would like to have URLS that look like this '/united-kingdom', '/france', but now they're looking like this '/United%20Kingdom'.
I saw the answers to this question Laravel clean links without spaces or uppercase , but for me they're not so useful since I'm not working with Eloquent models but the Query Builder (The db tables I get are ready made, I only have to display them).
So my questions are:
How to limit a route parameter more dynamically?
How to display data one way (written like it's also in the table like this 'United Kingdom'), but have a route like this ('united-kingdom')?
I am willing to provide more code or info if you need, I'm just pretty confused and have the feeling I'm overlooking something (big).
Thank you for your time and help!

Answer 1

If you would like a route parameter to always be constrained by a
given regular expression, you may use the pattern method. You should
define these patterns in the boot method of your RouteServiceProvider:
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;
//...
/**
* Define your route model bindings, pattern filters, etc.
*
* #return void
*/
public function boot()
{
$list_of_countries = DB::table('members')->whereNotNull('country')->pluck("country")->unique()->map(function ($name) {
return str_slug($name, '-');
})->reject(function ($name) {
return empty($name);
})->toArray();
$regex = '(' . implode('|', $list_of_countries) . ')';
Route::pattern('{country-slug}', $regex);
parent::boot();
}
routes\web.php
Route::get('/{country-slug}', 'PageController#show')->name('country');
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