Parsing URIs that have curly braces, URI::InvalidURIError: bad URI(is not URI?)

Question

Using ruby 1.9.2-p290. I came across an issue trying to parse a URI like the following:

require \'uri\'
my_uri = \"http://www.anyserver.com/getdata?anyparame         


        

Answer 1

RFC 1738 - http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1738.html means that you do have to encode the braces

Thus, only alphanumerics, the special characters "$-_.+!*'(),", and
reserved characters used for their reserved purposes may be used
unencoded within a URL.

Answer 2

# Need to not fail when uri contains curly braces
# This overrides the DEFAULT_PARSER with the UNRESERVED key, including '{' and '}'
# DEFAULT_PARSER is used everywhere, so its better to override it once
module URI
  remove_const :DEFAULT_PARSER
  unreserved = REGEXP::PATTERN::UNRESERVED
  DEFAULT_PARSER = Parser.new(:UNRESERVED => unreserved + "\{\}")
end

Following up the same issue, since DEFAULT_PARSER is used everywhere, its better to substitute it completely insted of just for the URI#parse method. Additionally this avoids allocating memory for the instantiation of a new Parser object every time.