Question

It appears the Net::HTTP library doesn’t support loading of local file via file:// . I’d like to configure loading of content from a file or remotely, depending on environment.

Is there a standard Ruby way to access either type the same way, or barring that some succinct code that branches?

Answer 1

Do you know about open-uri?

require 'open-uri'

open("/home/me/file.txt") { |f| ... }
open("http://www.google.com") { |f| ... }

So to support either “http://” or “file://” in one statement, simply remove the “file://” from the beginning of the uri if it is present (and no need to do any processing for “http://”), like so:

uri = ...
open(uri.sub(%r{^file://}, ''))