URI.encode does not encode &=?

Rails
1

I’m wondering why URI.encode does not encode &=?
URI.encode(’&=?’)
=> ‘&=?’

Is there alternative that works better? or should I write my own?

-reynard

2

What’s the second argument supposed to be though?
should I create a regexp from scratch or use a pre-defined one? the
documentation is not very clear.

From googling I found that some people say URI.encode is buggy and
suggested to use CGI.escape?
seems to work for me.

  • reynard
3

There’s an optional second arg to specify chars to replace:

http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/uri/rdoc/classes/URI/Escape.html#M009245

b

4

After I sent that I got curious… I found that the second arg is just a
regex with the chars to escape… so /[&=?]/ would escape the chars
you’re worried about.

I also found however, that it only escapes the chars in the regex if
you provide one… so you’ll have to make sure to escape the stuff that
would have been escaped.

I also figured out that the REGEXP::UNSAFE constant they mention is
actually URI::REGEXP::UNSAFE. If you require ‘uri’ in irb and then type
that, it’ll dump the chars that are in the default regex:

/[^-_.!~*’()a-zA-Z\d;/?:@&=+$,[]]/n

And, one more thing: the file that this is defined in should be at
RUBY_ROOT/uri/common.rb… and there are a lot of regexes defined in
there.

b