[harshreality]

The type of match is made explicit before the string/pattern.

"location = string" and "location string" and "location ^~ string" are non-regex matches.

"location ~ pattern" and "location ~* pattern" are regex matches.

Matching order is unintuitive and therefore bad, and there are plenty of other quirks with nginx configs that should be made more intuitive, but confusion between regex and non-regex is unusual.

It's all described right here: http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpCoreModule#location

[leeoniya]

ok, read through it again. the regex distinction is clear, that was my bad. the choice of prefix symbols is pretty poor. ^~ looks related to ~ and ~*. in the docs, the regex prefixes are presented first, so i associated ~ as a regex indicator. how wrong i was.

i generally disagree with ^ being the universal "not" indicator out of context since it's a "beginning of line assertion" when not preceded by "[" within a regex. The fact that it indicates what follows is a regex-halting literal string prefix match (exactly what ^ would indicate in a normal regex) is plain confusing.

thanks