Question

Is this a ruby bug?

target_url_to_edit = target_url

if target_url_to_edit.include?("http://")
  target_url_to_edit["http://"] = ""
end

logger.debug "target url is now #{target_url}"

This returns target_url without http://

Answer 1

You need to duplicate the in-memory object because variable names are just references to in-memory objects:

target_url_to_edit = target_url.dup

Now target_url_to_edit gets assigned a new copy of the original object.

For your case this code probably does the same in just one line (no dup, no if):

target_url_to_edit = target_url.sub(%r{^http://}, "")