Ruby OpenURI FTP not working when username has spaces

Question

I am using Ruby 1.9.3 and am running the following command:

open("ftp://user name:[email protected]/1234/1234.txt.gz")

which returns:

URI::InvalidURIError: bad URI(is not URI?)

Encoding the user name (replacing spaces with %20) does not work either:

Net::FTPPermError: 530 Invalid userid/password

The URI works fine in all browsers and FTP clients tested - just not when using OpenURI. Also, using Net::FTP (which is wrapped by OpenURI) works fine as well:

require 'net/ftp'
ftp = Net::FTP.new
ftp.connect("datafeeds.domain.com", 21)
ftp.login("user name", "password")
ftp.getbinaryfile("/1234/1234.txt.gz")

Any idea why the OpenURI method does not work, while the Net::FTP method does? Thanks.

Answer 1

By definition in the specification, URL user names only allow these characters:

user                   alphanum2 [ user ]
[...]
alphanum2              alpha | digit | - | _ | . | +  

Browsers are notorious for ignoring the specifications so saying they support it isn't a good proof. They shouldn't per the spec.

If cURL supports them, then use the Curb gem and see if that'll let you use them.

Answer 2

According to this StackOverflow answer, you should be able to just escape the special characters in your username and password. You could do something like:

login = URI.escape('user name') + ':' + URI.escape('password')
open("ftp://#{login}@datafeeds.domain.com/1234/1234.txt.gz")