Should be possible to use Ruby's URI implementation instead of Addressable::URI

[gh2k]

Sometimes Addressable::URI mangles urls to something incorrect. See: sporkmonger/addressable#160

When cobweb crawls one of these, the correct URL is put into redis, but when normalized it hits a 404. Examples would be any URI containing "%e2%80%b3"

Ruby's URI implementation doesn't do this. It would be nice to have an option of using this class instead.

[stewartmckee]

Thanks, hopefully they've fixed the ruby's uri implementation, but it was badly broken some years ago, since then i've used addressable as its been the most reliable, but would be good to add some options or even switch to ruby's uri if it is now true to the rfc.

[gh2k]

Do you know a good way to test the URI implementation in 2.1 against the RFC?

[sporkmonger]

Just closed sporkmonger/addressable#160 as "won't fix", but wanted to comment here because I suspect cobweb is actually misusing Addressable, given that this issue came up.

The uri.normalize method's output should not generally be used directly to query a web server. Instead, you want to use it as more of a lookup key for caches or previously crawled URLs, etc. So you'd use uri to query your web server and uri.normalize to record the output the web server gives you back. But you'd never want to make a request to the web server with the output of uri.normalize because it's an intentionally lossy operation that's primarily meant for lookups and equality testing (where both sides of the URI equality being tested get normalized and then compared). Probably 95+% of the time it'll work fine to do it the wrong way, but then every once in awhile it'll bite you.

Sorry about getting to this so late after the issue was opened.