RE or regular expressions and I don't really see eye to eye. But as a programmer, I have to work with them. So it's awkward like your ex works in the same office as you. But lucky for us, we just stick to a couple of tricks to make it a bit palatable.
Numbers in URL
You'll need to use a \d+ in the pattern.
ex: (r’^status/(\d+)$’, ‘myapp.backbone_view’)
This would work on /api/status/1
Dealing with spaces
I found two ways to do this but then found out that they are the same:[\w|\W]+ AND .+
Yes that's a dot.
ex: (r’^status/([\w|\W]+)$’, ‘myapp.backbone_view’) OR(r’^status/(.+)$’, ‘myapp.backbone_view’)
This would work on /api/status/dead on arrival
The browser will just replace the spaces with %20 and it should work.