This is kind of strange.
I have a route:
match "program/:program_id" => "program#details"
When calling this, everything works:
/program/1
However, the program IDs I use aren't digits only. They're in fact URLs like so: crid://blah.com/d1e5
How can I pass an URL via a RESTful approach as a paramter?
Calling this doesn't work, obviously:
/program/crid://blah.com/d1e5
/program/crid%3A%2F%2Fblah.com%2Fd1e5
Use program/*program_id instead of program/:program_id.
RFC 1738 says:
... only alphanumerics, the special characters "$-_.+!*'(),", and reserved characters used for their reserved purposes may be used unencoded within a URL.
So if you are trying to put a URL into the URL, you will either have to put up with the encoded characters because the colon : is not an allowed character except as the protocol seperator, and because a double slash // is not allowed except at the root of the URL, or you have to drop the protocol and the root from your URL and start with the domain. That is:
You can either do this:
/program/crid%3A%2F%2Fblah.com%2Fd1e5
or this
/program/blah.com/d1e5
A compromise when using Rails could be putting the protocol into a URL segment like so:
/program/crid/blah.com/d1e5
which you can collect in your params array with
match "program/:protocol/*program_id" => "program#details
The *program_id segment collects(globs) the rest of the url into a single entry in the params array.
you can recombine this in your controller if needed:
url = "#{params[:protocol]://#{params[:program_id]}}"
so that:
# GET /program/crid/blah.com/d1e5
params[:protocol] #=> "crid"
params[:program_id] #=> "blah.com/d1e5"
url = "#{params[:protocol]://#{params[:program_id]}}"
#=> "crid://blah.com/d1e5"
Related
Suppose I am expecting a url as part of my route - maybe a callback url or similar - I might use the following route:
get '/mymodel/:url', to: 'mycontroller#docallback', url: /.*/
Now I would like to be able to go to http://www.myapp.com/mymodel/http://www.google.co.uk/ and process http://www.google.co.uk/ in mycontroller - but it is processed as http:/www.google.co.uk/ (one slash). How can I rectify this? Is the regex wrong or is there some flag I have to set?
I don't think that "http://www.myapp.com/mymodel/http://www.google.co.uk/" is a valid url.
Normally if you want to pass a url as a parameter you would call CGI.escape on it first, which would convert "http://www.google.co.uk/" to "http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co.uk%2F" CGI.escape will turn any string into a url-safe version of itself, basically replacing any characters which have a special function in a url, like ":/?&" and also space and some other characters which would otherwise break the formatting.
So, you would end up with a url like
"http://www.myapp.com/mymodel/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co.uk%2F"
which would come through in params like
params = {:url => "http://www.google.co.uk/"}
Note how it's been unescaped here: Rails automatically* calls CGI.unescape on parameter values before putting them into the params hash.
However, this url
"http://www.myapp.com/mymodel/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co.uk%2F"
looks pretty weird to me. It would be better to be more explicit and pass it through as a named parameter in the url itself, like
"http://www.myapp.com/mymodel?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co.uk%2F"
which will require a slight change to your routes.
* I think Rails will do this but it might depend on circumstances. Try it.
...Turned out that the request was not encoded on the client side before being sent, solution was to use encodeURIComponent() on the url before sending it.
I need users to be able to pass a file path as a parameter of a get url (the file would not be uploaded and only the local file path is used for some security reasons). Now it's difficult for them to go and change all the backslashes to "%5". I was wondering if there is a way to force encoding of a part of the url. For example something as simple as putting it in double quotes, which doesn't work...
http://example.com/"c:\user\somone\somefile.txt"/dosomething
I ended up using pattern matching of rest routes at the server level. Something like this:
/example.com/*path/dosomething
So it would match any path even with slashes/backslashes. At last I do a decoding of the url to get rid of the escaped characters passed by browser for chars like space.
java.net.URLDecoder.decode(path, "UTF-8")
I am preparing a special string, in which keys are values are concatenated like below:
username=foo&age=24&email=foo#bar.com&homepage=http://foo.com
& is the separator for two key=value pairs
value is url encoded
I have a scenario where there are multiple home pages for a user.
I want to specify multiple urls for the homepage key
name=foo&age=24&email=foo#bar.com&homepage=url1<some_safe_url_separator_char>url2<some_safe_url_separator_char>url3
We have no control/idea over what url1, url2, .. may contain?
What is a good choice of some_safe_url_separator_char?
In other words I am not looking for a safe character to be used IN a url, but a safe character to be used to SEPARATE two urls in a string
well you can use URL re-writing for this .
It will make a URL that will be safe as it will hide the name of parameters
For refrence you can use URL rewriting
URL rewriting will make a url seprated by '/' and its tough to be decoded by an external person.
you can follow links i'm posting
URL rewriting for beginners
I have built a form that submits values to Wufoo as a GET request in the URL. I cannot get it to work if any of the values (in a textarea) contain a line-break or a forward slash. Is there a way to encode these in a URL?
This is being done in Rails.
I thought Rails would do that for you. But if you need to do it manually, you can use CGI::escape, e.g.
> require 'cgi'
...
> CGI.escape("hello%there\nworld")
=> "hello%25there%0Aworld"
EDIT:
Actually, CGI does not seem to escape a dot. URI can be used instead, it takes an extra parameter that lets you list extra characters you want escaped:
URI.escape("hello.there%world", ".")
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding
is there any existing rails helper to create a valid URL?
Specifically, I am generating a Web URL with some parameters that having special character (for e.g space i need to convert into + , and many others special characters).
http://domain.name?param1=ABC+DEF¶m2=GHI
Thanks.
You can use CGI.escape to do that.
CGI.escape("foo bar") # 'foo+bar'