I've just started my first Sinatra project, a simple TV-show management web app, and wanted to have beautiful URLs. So when a user types in the search box and submits, I don't want to have a /?search=foobar
-style URL and want do redirect them to /search/foobar
. This also enables me to separate the get '/search/:name
route from the main get '/'
route. I've implemented the redirect using a before
filter and properly escaped the params[]
variable:
before do
if params.has_key? 'search'
redirect to("/search/#{URI.escape(params['search'])}")
end
end
and later I continue with
get '/search/:query' do
result = search_api params[:query]
if result == 'null'
# no results
else
result = JSON.parse(result)
if result.key? 'shows'
# display search results
else
# redirect to one single show
# (result.keys).first is the real name of the show provided
# by the api. It may contain special characters
#
# (result.keys).first #=> "Breaking Bad"
# result.keys #=> "Breaking Bad"
# result.key? "Breaking Bad" #=> true
redirect to('/show/#{URI.escape((result.keys).first)}')
end
end
end
unfortunately, the redirect to the /show
page only works, if there are no URI special characters in the name apart from %
. This also means no spaces. When I search for something with a space or an umlaut or anything, e.g. a GET
for /?search=Breaking%20Bad
, I get the following error from Sinatra/Rack:
[2013-02-02 00:30:29] ERROR URI::InvalidURIError: bad URI(is not URI?): http://localhost:9393/show/Breaking Bad
/Users/Ps0ke/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/lib/ruby/1.9.1/uri/generic.rb:1202:in `rescue in merge'
/Users/Ps0ke/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/lib/ruby/1.9.1/uri/generic.rb:1199:in `merge'
/Users/Ps0ke/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/lib/ruby/1.9.1/webrick/httpresponse.rb:220:in `setup_header'
/Users/Ps0ke/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/lib/ruby/1.9.1/webrick/httpresponse.rb:150:in `send_response'
/Users/Ps0ke/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/lib/ruby/1.9.1/webrick/httpserver.rb:110:in `run'
/Users/Ps0ke/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/lib/ruby/1.9.1/webrick/server.rb:191:in `block in start_thread'
The browser shows me, that it got redirected to /search/Breaking%20Bad
, so the first redirect worked. This "bug" only occurs, when the search produces an exact hit, so the problem with the redirect is to search in the get '/search/:query'
route. I remember that it worked once, but can't find the right commit in my git history.
I am running
% gem list sinatra
sinatra (1.3.4, 1.3.3)
% gem list rack
rack (1.4.4, 1.4.1)
rack-cache (1.2)
rack-flash3 (1.0.3)
rack-protection (1.3.2, 1.2.0)
rack-ssl (1.3.2)
rack-test (0.6.2, 0.6.1)
Maybe someone of you can tell me:
- whether this is good or bad practices/there is another way in sinatra to prettifiy URLs
- how to fix this, since I think I have already escaped everything carefully
Thank you very much in advance :)