Addressabler

Addressabler extends the Addressable::URI class by adding TLD parsing, domain and subdomain parsing, query modification, and restoring setting of nested hashes to query strings.

Add Addressabler to your Gemfile:

gem "addressabler", ">= 0.1"

Addressabler will automatically require addressable/uri.

Use Addressable::URI like you normally would:

@uri = Addressable::URI.parse("http://www.google.com/")
@uri.host #=> "www.google.com"

Addressabler will add the following properties:

@uri.tld #=> "com"
@uri.domain #=> "google"
@uri.subdomain #=> "www"

You can set these values, as well:

@uri.tld = "org"
@uri.host #=> "www.google.org"
@uri.domain = "amazon"
@uri.host #=> "www.amazon.org"
@uri.subdomain = "developers"
@uri.host #=> "developers.amazon.org"

Addressabler copies some of Paul Dix's Domaintrix TLD code to support fancy TLDs, as well:

@uri.host = "www.google.co.uk"
@uri.tld #=> "co.uk"

By default, Addressabler knows about ICANN public TLDs. There are, however, lots and lots of private TLDs that companies have registered. For example, as Dom Hodgson points out, "blogspot.com" is a TLD by private, non-ICANN standards which are applied by the Mozilla foundation to the TLD list.

As such, Addressabler defaults to parsing the ICANN public TLDS (Addressabler.public_tlds) but can easily be instructed to look at private TLDs like so:

Addressabler.use_private_tlds = true

You can specify custom TLDs - which aren't actually working TLD's on the internet - for internal usage. One example would be a custom development TLD:

Addressabler.custom_tlds = {
  'dev' => {},              # mydomain.dev
  'bar' => { 'foo' => {} }  # mydomain.foo.bar
}

Addressabler adds a query_hash method to Addressable::URIs. This makes editing query strings a lot simpler, using a familiar Hash syntax:

@uri.query_hash[:foo] = :bar
@uri.to_s #=> "http://www.google.co.uk/?foo=bar"

The current maintainer of Addressable, Bob Aman, feels rather strongly that Rails got it wrong in supporting nested hashes in query strings.

Frankly, I don't disagree with anything he has to say on the issue, but it is a problem many people have experienced.

As such, since Rack already supports building nested hashes "the Rails Way" (shudder), I added support for assigning nested hashes to Addressable::URIs only if Rack is available. Addressabler will attempt to load Rack::Utils and, if it finds it, you can assign a nested hash in the query_hash= method like so:

@uri.query_hash = {:foo => {:bar => :baz}}
@uri.to_s #=> "http://www.google.co.uk/?foo[bar]=baz"

HANDLE WITH CARE! As Bob explains in the discussion, there's a better alternative to nested hashes in query strings, so try that before you install this library.

That's it. Enjoy.

Super special thankses to

• Jean Mertz for the custom TLD implementation
• Paul Dix for the Domainatrix parsing code
• Bob Aman for maintaining Addressable