Error When Trying to Open a URL in Ruby on Rails

Question

Environment: Ruby 1.9.2, Rails 3.0.3, Ubuntu

When I try to open a URL using:

open("http://www.cnn.com")

I get the following error:

Errno::ENOENT: No such file or directory - http://www.cnn.com
    from (irb):9:in `initialize'
    from (irb):9:in `open'
    from (irb):9

(It's a difficult topic to search). This is happening in both irb and in my app. It used to work under Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2.3.4 but it appears that something has changed.

Answer 1

I can reproduce the error if I try

open('http://www.google.com')

I'll get this error: `initialize': No such file or directory - http://www.google.com (Errno::ENOENT)

Instead, I required 'open-uri' in ruby 1.9.2 and it worked -

require 'open-uri'

url = URI.parse('http://www.google.com')
open(url) do |http|
  response = http.read
  puts "response: #{response.inspect}"
end

Answer 2

I tried something like this in Codecademy's exercise section. Turns out that the request wanted a closing backslash. Evidently open('http://google.com/') went through fine where open('http://google.com') did not.

Answer 3

I can't reproduce the error, in 1.8.7 I get a File object and in 1.9.2 I get a StringIO object. My guess is that some other code is overriding that functionality. Maybe you can try using the Net::HTTP object instead:

require 'net/http'
require 'uri'
Net::HTTP.get_print URI.parse('http://www.cnn.com')

or

require 'net/http'
require 'uri'

url = URI.parse('http://www.cnn.com')
res = Net::HTTP.start(url.host, url.port) {|http|
  http.get('/')
}
puts res.body