If I'm in an RHTML view in Rails, it is easy to URL-escape something:
<a href="/redirect?href=<%=u target %>">Foo</a>
How do I do this in a string? I'd like to do something like this:
<% redirect_href = "/redirect?#{url_escape target}&foo=bar&baz=some_other_stuff" -%>
<a href="<%= redirect_href =>">Foo</a>
This must be trivial, right?
Rails (activesupport) defines Hash#to_param (aliased to Hash#to_query):
{foo: 'asd asdf', bar: '"<#$dfs'}.to_param
# => "bar=%22%3C%23%24dfs&foo=asd+asdf"
It's worth noting that it sorts query keys (for HTTP caching).
Hash#to_param also accepts optional namespace parameter:
{name: 'David', nationality: 'Danish'}.to_param('user')
# => "user[name]=David&user[nationality]=Danish"
http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Hash.html#method-i-to_param
+ not %20 >> {y: "blah blah"}.to_query outputs "y=blah+blah"CGI.escape will do it:
<% redirect_href = "/redirect?#{CGI.escape target}&foo=bar&baz=some_other_stuff" -%>
<a href="<%= redirect_href =>">Foo</a>
CGI.escape is not the best thing, as it encodes space as '+' which is deprecated and not always parses correctly on the other side. For example, if you have Rails route "/my-path/:query" where query includes '+', it will stay as '+' after route parsing. To make it work better, use ERB::Util.u(string), which escapes space as "%20".
link_to("hi", "mailto:[email protected]?body=#{CGI.escape("one two")}") would give you the mail body "one+two" in Apple's desktop Mail.app.can be used from anywhere, part of ruby std lib.
%20Use either CGI::escape or ERB::Util.url_encode but not URI.encode.
URI.escape has been deprecated circa Ruby 1.9.2: What's the difference between URI.escape and CGI.escape?
