Building querystrings with ruby

Ruby
1

Hi *, my question is really simple: is there a way in Ruby stdlib or in
external modules to build querystrings without creating the string from
scratch ?
For example something like:

name = “Foo B.”
p URI::join(base_uri, query_string(name))

→ “Network Ability Ltd - Internet Systems Consultancy”

Obviously this code is totally invented.
If not (haven’t found anything in the documentation) how does people
accomplish this task ?

TIA,
ngw

2

On Wed, 15 Mar 2006, ngw wrote:

Obviously this code is totally invented.
If not (haven’t found anything in the documentation) how does people
accomplish this task ?

TIA,
ngw

harp:~ > cat a.rb
require “cgi”
class Hash
def query_string
“?” << inject([]){|a,kv| a << [CGI.escape(kv.shift),
CGI.escape(kv.shift)].join(“=”) }.join(“&”)
end
end

q = { “name” => “Foo B.”, “uri” => “http://ruby-lang.org” }

p q.query_string

harp:~ > ruby a.rb
“?name=Foo+Bar&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fruby-lang.org”

regards.

-a

3

On 15/03/06, [email protected] [email protected] wrote:

require “cgi”
class Hash
def query_string
“?” << inject([]){|a,kv| a << [CGI.escape(kv.shift), CGI.escape(kv.shift)].join(“=”) }.join(“&”)
end
end

Now here’s somewhere I can use the handy trick I learned yesterday:

“?” << inject([]){ |a,(k,v)| a << [CGI.escape(k),
CGI.escape(v)].join(“=”) }.join(“&”)

But this is shorter:

“?” << inject([]){ |a,kv| a << kv.map{ |e| CGI.escape(e) }.join(“=”)
}.join(“&”)

And this is shorter still:

“?” << to_hash.map{ |kv| kv.map{ |e| CGI.escape(e) }.join(“=”)
}.join(“&”)

Paul.

4

-Paul B. [email protected]:

On 15/03/06, Paul B. [email protected] wrote:

And this is shorter still:

“?” << to_hash.map{ |kv| kv.map{ |e| CGI.escape(e) }.join(“=”) }.join(“&”)

Ignore my stupidity above; this is shorter and less redundant:

“?” << map{ |kv| kv.map{ |e| CGI.escape(e) }.join(“=”) }.join(“&”)

Wow !
Thank you both, great snippets.

ngw

5

Wow, I have no idea what this does or how it works. Would you mind
taking this apart and describing how it works?

6

On 15/03/06, Paul B. [email protected] wrote:

And this is shorter still:

“?” << to_hash.map{ |kv| kv.map{ |e| CGI.escape(e) }.join(“=”) }.join(“&”)

Ignore my stupidity above; this is shorter and less redundant:

“?” << map{ |kv| kv.map{ |e| CGI.escape(e) }.join(“=”) }.join(“&”)

Paul.

7

perfectly. very clever.

thanks,

chad.

8

On 16/03/06, ebeard [email protected] wrote:

Wow, I have no idea what this does or how it works. Would you mind
taking this apart and describing how it works?

“?”<<map{|h|h.map{|e|CGI.escape(e)}‘=’}‘&’

This can be spaced out a bit:

“?” << # append what follows to the string ‘?’
map { |h| # h looks like [‘key’, ‘value’] for each key-value
pair
h.map { |e| # e looks like ‘key’ or ‘value’
CGI.escape(e) # escape each element
} * ‘=’ # join key and value with ‘=’
} * ‘&’ # join each key-value pair with ‘&’

Is that any clearer?

Paul.