Question

I’m trying to make a request to a web service (fwix), and in my rails app I’ve created the following initializer, which works… sorta, I have two problems however:

1. For some reason the values of the parameters need to have +‘s as the spaces, is this a standard thing that I can accomplish with ruby? Additionally is this a standard way to form a url? I thought that spaces were %20.

2. In my code how can I take any of the options sent in and just use them instead of having to state each one like query_items << "api_key=#{options[:api_key]}" if options[:api_key]

The following is my code, the trouble area I’m having are the lines starting with query_items for each parameter in the last method, any ideas would be awesome!

require 'httparty'
module Fwix
  class API
    include HTTParty

    class JSONParser < HTTParty::Parser
      def json
        JSON.parse(body)
      end
    end

    parser JSONParser
    base_uri "http://geoapi.fwix.com"

    def self.query(options = {})
      begin
        query_url = query_url(options)
        puts "querying: #{base_uri}#{query_url}"
        response = get( query_url )
      rescue
        raise "Connection to Fwix API failed" if response.nil?
      end
    end

    def self.query_url(input_options = {})
      @defaults ||= {
        :api_key => "my_api_key",
      }

      options = @defaults.merge(input_options)
      query_url = "/content.json?"
      query_items = []
      query_items << "api_key=#{options[:api_key]}" if options[:api_key]
      query_items << "province=#{options[:province]}" if options[:province]
      query_items << "city=#{options[:city]}" if options[:city]
      query_items << "address=#{options[:address]}" if options[:address]

      query_url += query_items.join('&')
      query_url
    end
  end
end

Answer 1

def self.query_url(input_options = {})
  options = {
    :api_key => "my_api_key",
  }.merge(input_options)

  query_url = "/content.json?"
  query_items = []

  options.each { |k, v| query_items << "#{k}=#{v.gsub(/\s/, '+')}" }

  query_url += query_items.join('&')
end