rails 2 route oddity

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have this in my routes.db

map.connect 'posts/tags/:id/:chain', :requirements => { :controller => 'posts', :action => 'tags', :chain => /chain/ }, :chain => nil

given this path

/posts/tags/onion+funny/chain

params becomes

chain: chain action: tags id: onion+funny controller: posts

params[:id] is NOT 'onion funny' as I expect. It is under rails 1.2.5.

2

Why should it be 'onion funny'? :id is 'onion+funny', that's what the url says. If you wanna have additional logic, I would put it in the controller.

3

It could be “onion funny” if you did: params[:id].split(“+”).join(" ") but what if someone puts a + in their tag?

4

yes it's easily handled in the controller. I just thought it odd that it worked under rails 1.2.5 but not 2.0.2

I don't allow + in tags. I also use space as tag separator, since I figure I display tag cloud using space as separator, so it's less confusing to the user if I require them to enter tags that way. To have compound word tags, I ask them to use - , e.g., pop-culture. (this makes for a nicer url /posts/tags/pop-culture instead of /posts/ tags/pop%20culture.) Now I wonder if the default comma as tag separator isn't the better way to go.

5

Or you could just do the cool thing and use commas to seperate the tags? What if someone wants to put a space in their tags?

“awesome post, large rant, big dog” as examples.

6

I'm running into this exact same problem. On rails 1.2.6, by default my paths that included a name with spaces used + instead of the space. So we have URLs like

/lists/Best+Movies

When I tried upgrading to 2.0, link_to now generates this

/lists/Best Movies

So now all my old URLs are broken. Any ideas? I'm surprised more people aren't feeling this pain.

Ben

7

Oh, I'm no routing expert by any means, so there's definitely a chance that something weird in my setup is causing this (especially of others aren't have this problem). I looked over my routes.rb and don't *think* I'm doing anything weird, but I've certainly been wrong before.

Any and all ideas about the source of the problem or possible workarounds would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Ben

8

OK, after digging around a little bit in actionpack-2.0.2/lib/ action_controller/routing.rb, it looks like Rails has switched from using CGI.escape to URI.escape. And you can clearly see the difference in the console

CGI.escape(' ')

=> "+"

URI.escape(' ')

=> "%20"

So, my question becomes - does anyone know if this change in behavior (in the case of spaces) was intentional? Are reason why the old behavior is not supported? And any ideas on workarounds (realistically, changing all our links isn't a great option because we'll break existing incoming links to our app).

Thanks!

Ben

9

OK, I did a little more investigation. It looks like this was intended. Here is a snippet of actionpack/test/controller/ routing_test.rb