Question

I have this filter in my Sinatra app:

before '/:locale/*' do
  # stuff...
  request.path_info = params[:splat]
end

In other words, I want to just get the locale part of the URL and then let the app procede as if it wasn’t there. (Of course using the locale when rendering views.)

This works fine under Ruby 1.8.7 but breaks on >=1.9, because the splat is now an array with one item, instead of just a string. I had to use params[:splat].first to make it work.

My question is simply where this discrepancy comes from. Is it simply a Ruby 1.8 vs 1.9 thing? Or is Sinatra somehow involved?

Just want to be able to fix this kind of thing more easily in the future.

Answer 1

Sinatra doc seems to indicate that params[:splat] can be either a string or an array, so you could do something like this to handle either case:

request.path_info = [*params[:splat]].first

Which I demonstrate here:

$ cat splat.rb
[ { :splat => [ "/foo" ] }, { :splat => "/foo" } ].each do |params|
    path_info = [*params[:splat]].first
    puts "#{path_info} (#{path_info.class})"
end
$ ruby1.8 splat.rb
/foo (String)
/foo (String)
$ ruby1.9.1 splat.rb
/foo (String)
/foo (String)