url_for does not honor :escape => false when generating URLs from routes

rubyonrails-core
1

Executive summary: :escape => false is only used in UrlHelper's :url_for. It is not passed to RoutSet's :generate, and thus not to the Route or its Segments. Thus, regardless of the :escape setting, generating a URL from a route (named or otherwise) will always escape each segment, and thus the whole path.

Problem in detail: I have a Tag class, and I'd like routes like /tags/java /tags/c++ etc.

The problem comes in with tags that have a period, forward-slash, question mark, or octothorp in them, since any of those can indicate the end of a path segment. Thus, I have

class Tag ...   def to_param     URI::encode self.name, /[\/.?#]/   end end

The problem is that the resulting %xy is always double-escaped to %25xy.

Possible solutions: 1. pass :escape to Segment. I believe the offending method is DynamicSegment's :interpolation_chunk. 2. do no escaping in Segment; only do escaping in UrlHelper and/or UrlWriter.

I'm not sure of the ramifications of either. Suggestions?

-Gaius

2

1. pass :escape to Segment. I believe the offending method is DynamicSegment's :interpolation_chunk. 2. do no escaping in Segment; only do escaping in UrlHelper and/or UrlWriter. I'm not sure of the ramifications of either. Suggestions?

This has been like this for a while, so I'd like to hold off doing either of these things until we ship a 2.2 final release.

However 'fundamentally' it seems wrong to me that you have to do escaping in your .to_param method, you should be able to return whatever from those and rely on the fact that it'll get escaped deeper in the routing machinery. Moving it out of the dynamic segment will probably be tricky as there's a lot of information there that other areas don't have access to. But basically, if we focus on the desired API, and choose our solution from that, we'll come up with a nice location for the fix.