title: Laravel routing: static text in optional url segment
body: <p>I'm migrating the forum section of my website to Laravel 4. I manage the pagination myself. (Not the Laravel built-in one)</p>
  
  <p>My urls currently use the following format:</p>
  
  <pre><code>example.com/forum
  example.com/forum/page-1
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'd like to keep it like that after the migration.</p>
  
  <p>My route looks like that:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Route::get('/forum/page-{page?}',
      array('uses' =&gt; 'ForumController@showForum', 'as' =&gt; 'forum'));
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But of course it doesn't work when I request the page without a page number.</p>
  
  <p>I can do it like <code>/forum/{pagetext?}-{page?}</code> but I dont want to have to catch the pagetext parameter in my Controller, and I want to only give the $page parameter when I build urls for the page with URL::route().</p>
  
  <p>I've found many examples on Internet but it was always with multiple parameters, no static optional text.</p>
  
  <p>How can I make this "static" portion optional as well ?</p>
  
  <p>I'm thinking to something like an optional group in a regular expression, like <code>/forum/(page-{page})?</code> but how do I do that in Laravel ?</p>