Replace ruby's URI parser with Addressable

Today I was trying to read an url in ruby that URI didn't like the url of:

require 'open-uri'
open 'http://foo_bar.baz.com/'

generic.rb:213:in `initialize': the scheme http does not accept registry part: foo_bar.baz.com (or bad hostname?) (URI::InvalidURIError)

D'oh! This is a valid url, but sometimes URI can be a little bit old-fashioned about what to accept.

The solution? Addressable is a more RFC-conformant replacement for URI. But how to get open-uri and other libs to use it?

After poking around the internet for an hour or so and not coming up with anything I settled on this:

require 'addressable/uri'

class URI::Parser
  def split url
    a = Addressable::URI::parse url
    [a.scheme, a.userinfo, a.host, a.port, nil, a.path, nil, a.query, a.fragment]
  end
end

open 'http://foo_bar.baz.com/'

Yay! No parse error (obviously the url still won't open because I made it up.)

Notice that I threw away 2 parts of the url, registry and opaque. These are things that addressable doesn't have and I never see anyway so I don't expect it to be a problem.

I'll just start putting this bit of code into all my projects from now on and we'll have to wait and see if it creates any problems.

Convert relative urls to absolute in php with Phpuri

Here's another common problem, how do I convert my relative urls to absolute urls in php? In most scripting languages there's some built in class that can do this for you. Unfortunately php is really a web development language so general purpose libraries can be lacking.

I tested two popular solutions against my test case and in the end decided to create a simpllified 'port' of ruby's URI class. Let's take a look at the competition:

• rel2abs - The nicest thing I can say about this solution is that it's the fastest. Unfortunately it failed 30% of my tests.
  Usage: rel2abs($rel, $base)
• UrlToAbsolute - This one did fairly well, passing 90% of my tests. Keep in mind that many of the tests are rare edge cases, so I imagine real world success would be close to 100%. I could almost be happy with this one. Unfortunately the global namespace clutter it creates is a potential disaster, I decided it's best to steer clear of this one as well.
  Usage: url_to_absolute($base, $rel)
• Phpuri - While it passed 100% of the tests, I will concede that the deck was stacked. In other words I had the tests in mind while writing it and the goal was specifically to pass those tests.
  Usage: phpUri::parse($base)->join($rel)

The Verdict:

Obviously I'm biased but I'm scoring this one for Phpuri.
Leave a comment if you disagree, I want to hear about it.

The Code:

require 'phpuri.php';
echo phpUri::parse('https://www.google.com/')->join('foo');
//==> https://www.google.com/foo

The Download:

View the project or download just the latest source