In Angular, What is 'pathmatch: full' and what effect does it have?

Question

In here it is use pathmatch as full and when i delete this pathmatch it doesn't even load the app or run the project

import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';
import { BrowserModule } from '@angular/platform-browser';
import { HttpModule } from '@angular/http';
import { RouterModule } from '@angular/router';

import { AppComponent }  from './app.component';
import { WelcomeComponent } from './home/welcome.component';

/* Feature Modules */
import { ProductModule } from './products/product.module';

@NgModule({
  imports: [
    BrowserModule,
    HttpModule,
    RouterModule.forRoot([
      { path: 'welcome', component: WelcomeComponent },
      { path: '', redirectTo: 'welcome', pathMatch: 'full' },
      { path: '**', redirectTo: 'welcome', pathMatch: 'full' }
    ]),
    ProductModule
  ],
  declarations: [
    AppComponent,
    WelcomeComponent
  ],
  bootstrap: [ AppComponent ]
})
export class AppModule { }

Answer 1

RouterModule.forRoot([
      { path: 'welcome', component: WelcomeComponent },
      { path: '', redirectTo: 'welcome', pathMatch: 'full' },
      { path: '**', component: 'pageNotFoundComponent' }
    ])

Case 1 pathMatch:'full': In this case, when app is launched on localhost:4200 (or some server) the default page will be welcome screen, since the url will be https://localhost:4200/

If https://localhost:4200/gibberish this will redirect to pageNotFound screen because of path:'**' wildcard

Case 2 pathMatch:'prefix':

If the routes have { path: '', redirectTo: 'welcome', pathMatch: 'prefix' }, now this will never reach the wildcard route since every url would match path:'' defined.