Special characters in filename affecting aws-sdk ruby gem url_for method

Question

I am using the official AWS ruby gem for S3 and I am having trouble using the "url_for" method on files that have special characters in them (ie. commas, apostrophes). I am using the latest aws-sdk gem for ruby and my code looks like this:

s3 = AWS::S3::new
bucket = s3.buckets[bucket]
object = bucket.objects[object_address]
object_url = object.url_for(:read, :expires => 60*60, :secure => true)

The object is getting found correctly, but the URL I get from url_for gives me a HTTPError: 404 Not Found error. It works fine if the filename doesn't have commas or apostrophes in it.

Is there a way to handle this without needing to restrict the filenames in the first place?

Answer 1

Are you escaping the URL string by default? For example:

object_url =  CGI.escape(object.url_for(:read, :expires => 60*60, :secure => true))

This would properly escape the string into a browser-readable format. I do this for all of my secure S3 URL's since there are sometimes a / or + character in the signature that will cause the link to fail as well if it's not properly escaped. This will also escape the commas and apostrophes properly.