Ruby URI

Ruby URI

Recently I was creating a search mechanism which was using filtered data from the URL provided by the user. I had URL like this https://example.com/123456 and I had to grab this part 123456 and then check in the database if there is any record with such id. Sounds easy. First thing which comes to mind is "https://example.com/123456".slice(20..25) and Voila! we got it and now we can ask db for needed info… well not exactly.

It’s true code above will work fine, but only in this certain simple example. What if our URL whould look like this: https://example.com/invoice/123456#?id_invoice=64714159 ? Things could get pretty messy pretty quickly, but there is one superhero:

URI

What is uri ?

URI is a module providing classes to handle Uniform Resource Identifiers (RFC2396) written by Akira Yamada

For more information check out ruby_docs

Let’s get our hands dirty with it!

require 'uri`

uri = URI("https://example.com/invoice/123456#?id_invoice=64714159")
uri.path.split("/invoice/")[1]

Now we got it right, even if there will be something after our invoice id (123456) we got it covered. So what happend here?:

We have to require our module so we doing it in line no.1 On third line we are declaring variable with our URL address inside URI wrapper. Output of this line in terminal will be:

=> #<URI::HTTPS https://example.com/invoice/6519316#?id_invoice=64714159>

And now we can use specific URI methods/classes on this object like uri.path on line four. Output of it will look like this: "/invoice/6519316".

Cool we are getting close we got rid of all that additional crap, but there is still something to dissect.

For this we will use split method like so: uri.path.split("/invoice/") after this we will get: ["", "6519316"].

So close but now we have our id in two element array. To deal with it nice and quickly there is one last thing to do - get array element of index 1.

To do so we type: uri.path.split("/invoice/")[1] Then the grand price is shown - terminal output with "123456". All of this in just 3 lines of code, pretty cool, eh?

Now asking db for that id is nothing but a pleasure.

Cheers