Rails 3 query string

Question

Very weird error here. We correctly get a request for something like "/users/8788234"

In Rails we call:

redirect_to(:controller => 'login', :from_external_page => true, :on_login => request.env['REQUEST_URI']) and return

We see (as we'd expect) in the Rails log: Redirected to

https://sampleapp.com/login?from_external_page=true&on_login=%2Fusers%2F8788234

But then the next request we see from the IP has the values of the query string scrambled:

Started GET "/login?from_external_page=gehr&on_login=%2Shfref%2S8788234" for xx.xxx.xxx.xxx at yyyy-mm-dd

This both makes the query string values meaningless and causes the following error:

ArgumentError: invalid %-encoding

(The %2F was changed to %2S which is invalid). Every single value of each key-value pair within the query string is getting shifted by 13 characters. Every time we've seen this, the user agent reads: "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0)", but we also see that user agent successfully navigate the application. Has anyone ever seen anything like this? http://www.whatismybrowser.com/ tells me that this user agent is IE9 running on Windows 7, but we haven't been able to reproduce the bug.

Answer 1

This certainly is encoding issue. I am using Rails 4 now and following is sample query string of my current project. Note the very first parameter in querystring is "utf8=✓" which is missing in your querystring.

profiles?utf8=✓&min_age=1&max_age=99&min_height=1&max_height=6&min_weight=1&max_weight=400

Try adding "# encoding: UTF-8 at the beginning of the file"