Get URL string parameters?

Question

I have this URL in my database, in the "location" field:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I can get it with @object.location, but how can I get the value of v? I mean, get "xxxxxxxxxxxx" from the URL string?

Answer 1

require 'uri'
require 'cgi'

# use URI.parse to parse the URL into its constituent parts - host, port, query string..
uri = URI.parse(@object.location)
# then use CGI.parse to parse the query string into a hash of names and values
uri_params = CGI.parse(uri.query)

uri_params['v'] # => ["xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"]

Note that the return from CGI.parse is a Hash of Strings to Arrays so that it can handle multiple values for the same parameter name. For your example you would want uri_params['v'][0].

Also note that the Hash returned by CGI.parse will return [] if the requested key is not found, therefore uri_params['v'][0] will return either the value or nil if the URL did not contain a v parameter.