Ruby equivalent to PHPs urlencode

Question

I need to convert a URL in Ruby which contains the character "ö".

In PHP, urlencode returns %F6 for ö which seems to be the Hex-value for "ö" in ISO 8859.

I tried several different methods but none of them returned the correct character:

• CGI.escape 'ö' -> %C3%B6
• URI.encode 'o' -> %C3%B6
• ERB::Util.url_encode 'ö' -> %C3%B6
• 'ö'.force_encoding('iso-8859-1') -> \xC3\xB

What method should I use to get the desired output?

-e-

Additional requirement:

I only need to convert these characters in the path of the url. Colons, slashes etc. should remain the same:

http://example.com/this/is/an/ö

will be

http://example.com/this/is/an/%F6

Answer 1

Ruby uses UTF-8 strings by default:

str = 'ö'

str.encoding
#=> #<Encoding:UTF-8>

If you want an ISO 8859 encoded string in Ruby, you have to convert it:

str.encode('ISO-8859-1')
#=> "\xF6"

to URL-encode a string, there's CGI.escape:

require 'cgi'

CGI.escape(str.encode('ISO-8859-1'))
#=> "%F6"

to encode an URL, use URI.escape:

require 'uri'

url = 'http://example.com/this/is/an/ö'
URI.escape(url.encode('ISO-8859-1'))
#=> "http://example.com/this/is/an/%F6"