Question

I’m parsing the URL in Rails controller using URI.parse, i.e.

URI.parse(user_URL)

When the user inputs something such as %, the webpage raises the error

bad URI(is not URI?): %

and shows error page.

Rather, I’d like it to go to my page which says “Your URL % is not valid”. Is it possible?

Answer 1

Just wrap the parse call in a begin/end block with a rescue for the case where the URL is invalid:

begin
  URI.parse(user_URL)
  ... do some stuff ...
rescue URI::InvalidURIError
  redirect_to :invalid_url_page, :url => user_URL
end

Then in your invalid_url_page controller action (or whatever you call that action), you can access the invalid url with params[:url]. In the view associated with that action, you can display the message “Your URL % is not valid” with:

Your URL <%= params[:url] %> is not valid.