#146 URIs with addressable

Using the addressable gem for better handling of URIs/URLs

Notes

URI/URL handling in Ruby is usually handled by default with the URI class from the standard library. It suffers from a few annoyances, for example:

• a lot of legacy cruft (try finding the correct encode/escape function for a given situation!)
• does a pretty good job of decomposing URLs, but doesn’t provide much help when going the other way - composing URLs from parts
• it has a very old school and un-ruby-ish API

The addressable gem solves many of these problems, and may in fact already be in your project - it’s a popular dependency of many widely used gems like fog and capybara.

I’m just going to test drive a few common scenarios and compare the URI and addressable capabilities. The examples.rb script tests the actual code.

URL Decomposition

The simplest task, and no surpises here. Given a URI-ish string, parse out the component parts.

The URI way:

uri = URI(given)

The addressable way:

uri = Addressable::URI.parse(given)

The main advantage of addressable here is that it provides some nice additional methods for examining the result, including: ip_based?, default_port, inferred_port, tld, domain, site, basename, extname.

URL Composition

Given the individual component parts (scheme, host, path etc), create a valid URI.

The URI way:

uri = URI.new('http', nil, 'www.example.com', nil, nil, '/foo/bar', false, nil, nil)
uri = URI::Generic.build({:scheme => 'http', :host => 'www.example.com', :path => '/foo/bar'})
uri = URI::HTTP.build({:host => 'www.example.com', :path => '/foo/bar'})
uri = URI::HTTPS.build({:host => 'www.example.com', :path => '/foo/bar'})

The addressable way:

uri = Addressable::URI.new({:scheme => 'http', :host => 'www.example.com', :path => '/foo/bar'})

URI Templates

More goodness in addressable: RFC 6570 URI templates.

An Addressable::Template defines to expand or extract the components of a URI. This could make funky argument parsing easier if one is not working within a web framework that already provides this capability.

Running the Examples

See the examples.rb script for details.

$ ruby examples.rb
Run options: --seed 49659

# Running:

......

Finished in 0.034040s, 235.0176 runs/s, 940.0705 assertions/s.

8 runs, 32 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips

Credits and References

• addressable - source
• addressable - rubydoc
• addressable - rubygems
• Ruby URI - apidock
• Ruby URI - ruby-lang