How do I easily parse a URL with parameters in a Rails test?

Question

I have a some code that embeds a return_to URL into a redirect (like OpenID) that I want to test:

def test_uses_referrer_for_return_to
  expecte         


        

Answer 1

You want Addressable for this.

uri = Addressable::URI.parse("http://example.com/?var=value")
uri.query_values # => {"var"=>"value"}
uri.query_values = {"one" => "1", "two" => "2"}
uri.to_s # => "http://example.com/?two=2&one=1"

It'll automatically handle all the escaping rules for you, and it has some other useful features, like not throwing exceptions for perfectly valid but obscure URIs like the built-in URI parser.

Answer 2

CGI::parse(querystring) will parse a querystring into a hash. Then, CGI::unescape(string) will undo any URL-encoding in the value.

Alternatively, you can use Rack::Utils.parse_query and Rack::Utils.unescape if you're on a recent Rack-based version of Rails, and want to be super-modern.

I'm not aware of any Rails-specific helper methods that wrap these utility functions, but they're pretty simple to use, and CGI or Rack is already loaded in the Rails environment anyway.