Question

I have a url field named link in my model with the following validation

validates_uniqueness_of :link, :case_sensitive => false

When I put “http://stackoverflow.com“, it goes well.
Now when I put “https://stackoverflow.com/” (with the trailing slach), this is also accepted as unique.
But I want it to be invalid though there is “/” at the last?

Answer 1

I’d suggest that you normalize your URLs (add/strip trailing slash, etc. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_normalization) before storing them in the DB and even before validation.

validates_uniqueness_of :link, :case_sensitive => false
before_validation :normalize_urls

def normalize_urls
  self.link.strip!
  self.link.gsub!(/\/$/,'')
end

This isn’t quite what you were asking for but if you don’t store normalized URLs, you’ll have to query your DB for all possible variations during validation and that could quickly get expensive.