Rails escape all URLs - ruby-on-rails

In Rails, I'd like to be able to escape all my URLs using link_to across the board. What is the best way to do this?
Currently, the permalinks are stored in UTF-8. e.g. it's stored as: 水-water
I'm running Spree, so I would like to avoid overriding all the template files with CGI.escapes to achieve the same thing.
Other considerations:
Store the Escaped url in the permalinks column? (params encodes it to UTF-8 and then the sequel can't find it because it was stored in the DB as escaped)
Thanks in advanced!
Justin

Nevermind, link_to already escapes the UTF-8 properly. It was the browser already interpreting it making me perceive it as unescaped.
Using a Raw HTTP Viewer such as: http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html
Helped see that.

Related

How can I show the name of the link without http://, https://, and everything that goes after .com and other similar domains?

In my view I'm displaying the link in a such way:
<%= #casino.play_now_link %>
So, #casino.play_now_link can be like this: https://www.spinstation.com/?page=blockedcountry&content=1 What I need, is to display only this part: www.spinstation.com. I tried gsub('http://', '').gsub('https://', ''), and it works, but how can I remove the part of url name after .com? Thanks in advance.
Don't use regexes at all for this sort of thing, use URI from the standard library:
URI.parse(#casino.play_now_link).hostname
or, for a more robust solution, use Addressable:
Addressable::URI.parse(#casino.play_now_link).hostname
Of course, this assumes that you've properly validated that your play_now_links are valid URIs. If you haven't then you can add validations that use URI or Addressable to do so and either clean up existing play_now_links that aren't valid URIs or wrap the parsing and hostname extraction in a method (which is a good idea anyway) with some error handling.
In a simple way one can use
.split('/')[2]
which is regex based and depends on the '/' in your url.
But as #mu is too short mentioned: URI is better for this.

Rails comments system with bb-code

In my rails 4 app i want to add comments to my articles, but i want to add functional as most forum-engines do (like SMF), and i need to add bb-code for it.
Are there any good gem for it? With rails 4 support? How then in controller i can translate [quote] to some div with some style?
Also how is it good to store html data in database?
For example if i use haml, and somebody post comment as
- current_user.id
or something similar to this, how to secure my app from "bad boys" ? Sure i can change comments system to something like: quote_parent_id, but if i have multiple quotes in one comment? so it is hard to realise, better is to store html, but to secure it somehow.
Could i do this? And how? Please give good ideas, tutorials, gem-links.
Look into https://github.com/veger/ruby-bbcode
Since it converts to HTML and does not excecute user input as Ruby code - you'll be fairly safe. However, I havent tried the gem and its possible it introduces some XSS vulnerabilities.
Have you considered Markdown as an option?
You should also look into https://github.com/asceth/bbcoder ( I should note I am the original author ).
In the controller, changing a string such as "[quote=user]My post of epic importance[/quote]" into a div etc is just doing:
# assume params[:comment] is the text you are converting
params[:comment].bbcode_to_html
As for storing html in a database, there is no right or wrong answer. If you want to allow users to edit their posts later then I would lean towards not storing the html version but storing their original bbcode version. This way when you allow them to edit you aren't having to convert html back to bbcode.
To make sure you aren't open to XSS and other attacks I recommend combining other gems like sanitize.
Sanitize.clean(text.to_s).bbcode_to_html
Some more notes:
Multiple tags and nested tags are parsed as they are seen without any additional steps required. So a comment or post with lots of bbcode tags, multiple quotes, b tags or anything else is dealt with by just calling bbcode_to_html on the variable/string.
If a user tries to use haml in their post it should appear as-is. haml shouldn't try to eval the string unless you specifically tell it to which I'm not even sure how to do that unless haml as a special filter or operator.

How to disable UTF character (punctuation) escaping when creating XML using default to_xml with Rails?

Given a rails models column that contains
"Something & Something Else" when outputting to_xml
Rails will escape the Ampersand like so:
<MyElement>Something & Something Else</MyElement>
Our client software is all UTF aware and it would be better if we can just leave the column content raw in our XML output.
There was an old solution that worked by setting $KCODE="UTF8" in an environment file, but this trick no longer works, and was always an All or Nothing solution.
Any recommendations on how to disable this? on a case by case basis?
It does not matter if the client software is UTF-8-aware. An ampersand cannot be used unescaped in XML. If the software is supposed to also be XML-aware, then any content that includes ampersands is not allowed to be kept "raw".
This is nothing to do with Unicode (or "UTF"). Ampersands in XML must be escaped, otherwise it isn't XML, and no XML software will accept it. If you're saying you want the escaping disabled, then you're saying you don't want the output to be XML.

Creating a shortened URL for all objects in the database

I would like to display a shortened URL besides the content items on my site for ease of sharing.
What would be the most efficient way of doing so, and are there any suitable gems / libraries?
I am using rails on a mongodb/mongoid stack
should be simple enough (regardless if you are on Mongo / MySQL or anything else). what you need is a small collection (mongo if i may) that holds some kind of an MD5 hash of the real url you are after and the real url itself, for example:
ShortLink.create(:hash_link => Digest::MD5.hexdigest(resource_url(#resource)), :real_link => resource_url(#resource))
I suggest adding another route that catches those like this:
match "l/:key", "ShortLinks#show"
should be easy.
I think you can use bitly gem to shorten your URL.
The following link helps you to configure bitly:
http://www.marketingformavens.com/blog/url-shortening-bitly-ruby-on-rails

Encrypt/Decrypt String

I have a simple problem for that I'd like to hear your thoughts:
I have this URL in Rails http://example.com/hosts/show/somehost
I'm getting the 'somehost' part via params[:id]. I'm calling URI.encode on 'somehost' but this does not encode '.' characters. Rails won't recognize ID parts with points in it so I tried to replace the points with '%2E' - That works, but Firefox (and I guess other browsers too) changes the '%2E' back to points right after the request. This makes copy&paste impossible and will lead to a lot of problems.
I'd like to encrypt and decrypt the 'somehost' part in an URL-safe way - Any suggestions? I can't call by an numeric primary key because of the underlying architecture. I have to look up by name.
Thank you all very much!
You could use base64 encoding, but it would be better to fix the actual problem you are having. This issue is described here. You need to set a :requirements key for your routes file with a regex that includes the dot.

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