Question

I’m using the following snippet in a Rails app:

require 'open-uri'
url = "http://..."
uri = URI.parse(self.url)
file = open(uri)
puts "path: #{file.path}"

Which works on some files from the web, then crashes on others with:

undefined method `path’ for #< StringIO:0x00000102a47240 >

Any way to fix this strange, intermittent problem?

Answer 1

Don’t use Open::URI like that.

Simply do:

file = open(url)

Then you can read the file because you have an IO-type object:

body = file.read

or

body = open(url).read

If you need the path, parse the URL with URI and get the path that way.