Laravel splat routes

Recently I had to change one of the slugs for a model on a site I was working on. Because the pages under that model would have had a lot of inbound links we wanted to do a 301 redirect to the new slug. Here's the route I added which I thought would do the trick.

// Wrong way, only handles the first level of nesting
Route::get('umelb/{splat?}', function($splat = '') {
    return Redirect::to("unimelb/{$splat}", 301);
});

However, while this would work for anything one directory under the slug it wouldn't work for anything more nested than that. For example:

• umelb/subjects would 301 redirect to unimelb/subjects, however;
• umelb/subjects/mdia1001 would 404 instead.

The fix to this is to let the route know that the splat can literally be any character, so that it will encompass every route underneath.

// Better way, handles any level of nesting
Route::get('umelb/{splat?}', function ($splat = '') {
    return Redirect::to("unimelb/{$splat}", 301);
})->where('splat', '.+');