How can multiple trailing slashes can be removed from a URL in Ruby

ruby regex malformed url-parsing
splintercell picture splintercell · May 4, 2010 · Viewed 9.2k times · Source

What I'm trying to achieve here is lets say we have two example URLs:

url1 = "http://emy.dod.com/kaskaa/dkaiad/amaa//////////"
url2 = "http://www.example.com/"

How can I extract the striped down URLs?

url1 = "http://emy.dod.com/kaskaa/dkaiad/amaa"
url2 = "http://http://www.example.com"

URI.parse in Ruby sanitizes certain type of malformed URL but is ineffective in this case.

If we use regex then /^(.*)\/$/ removes a single slash / from url1 and is ineffective for url2.

Is anybody aware of how to handle this type of URL parsing?

The point here is I don't want my system to have http://www.example.com/ and http://www.example.com being treated as two different URLs. And same goes for http://emy.dod.com/kaskaa/dkaiad/amaa//// and http://emy.dod.com/kaskaa/dkaiad/amaa/.

Answer

Aliaksei Kliuchnikau picture Aliaksei Kliuchnikau · May 4, 2010

If you just need to remove all slashes from the end of the url string then you can try the following regex: 

"http://emy.dod.com/kaskaa/dkaiad/amaa//////////".sub(/(\/)+$/,'')
"http://www.example.com/".sub(/(\/)+$/,'')

/(\/)+$/ - this regex finds one or more slashes at the end of the string. Then we replace this match with empty string.

Hope this helps.

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