What is the difference between Ruby's 'ope

Question

It seems like both of these gems perform very similar tasks. Can anyone give examples of where one gem would be more useful than the other? I don't have specific code that I'm referring to, I'm more wondering about general use cases for each gem. I know this is a short question, I will fill in the blanks upon request. Thanks.

Answer 1

I just found out that open does follow redirections, while Net::HTTP doesn't, which is an important difference.

For example, open('http://www.stackoverflow.com') { |content| puts content.read } will display the proper HTML after following the redirection, while Net::HTTP.get(URI('http://www.stackoverflow.com')) will show the redirection message and 302 status code.

Answer 2

The reason they look like they perform similar tasks is OpenURI is a wrapper for Net::HTTP, Net::HTTPS, and Net::FTP.

Usually, unless you feel you need a lower level interface, using OpenURI is better as you can get by with less code. Using OpenURI you can open a URL/URI and treat it as a file.

See: http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.9.3/libdoc/open-uri/rdoc/OpenURI.html and http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.9.3//libdoc/net/http/rdoc/Net.html