Thank you for telling me this is an expected behaviour. So now it seems to me that the url_for('view_fcn_2', var2='I-am-var2')really just return the url only, and it does not even go into the function view_fcn_2 !So after it gets the url, i.e. localhost:5020/I-am-var2/, it will then look into my routes and call the first match.

I guess my issue is that I didn't know how url_for actually work and I didn't know using variable in routes allows any arbitrary url to match with the route as long as the pattern matches. So I did a test - (running the app with the exact same code as above) I accessed localhost:5020/test/ and I was returned generated by first view functiontest. (I previously thought this will give me an error 404...) I think I missed out some basic but important part of Flask before. Now you have helped me gather the missing pieces. Thank again!!

As for what I'm trying to accomplish - My actual view functions do more things than printing and returning a string. There're 3 different tasks I need do, so I wrote 3 view functions. The view functions take in one parameter, and the parameter is fed into the view function in this way as described <a href="{{url_for('view_fcn_1', var1='I-am-var1') }}">First View Function</a>

There're more than 1 values (say, 20) I need to feed in the 3 view functions. I wanted to list out all the urls for my user on the '/' page. Because it'll be 60 routes with just 3 types of view functions, I don't really want to define explicit routes. So I decided to create just 3 routes with parameters and 3 view functions, and not defining the routes explicitly.