Rails Routes - How to make them case insensitive?

Question

Routes in Ruby on Rails are case sensitive. It seems someone brought this up before, and it has been labeled will not fix.

http://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/393-routes-are-case-sensitive

That strikes me as unfortunate, as I don't really see any upside on my own application for routes to be case sensitive, while on the downside it creates a potential for confusion and a general appearance of lack of polish in my opinion.

What's the best way to make my routes case insensitive?

I found this tip on a Google search:

map.connect "web_feeds/:action", :controller  => 'web_feeds', :action => /[a-z_]+/i

This is clever, but it still leaves the web_feeds portion of the url case sensitive. I don't see any similar way around this, however, without entering in each possible combination of wEb_feEds manually, but that is obviously a horrible solution for any number of reasons.

Answer 1

Routes in Rails are case sensitive because URLs are case sensitive. From the W3C:

URLs in general are case-sensitive (with the exception of machine names). There may be URLs, or parts of URLs, where case doesn't matter, but identifying these may not be easy. Users should always consider that URLs are case-sensitive.

Answer 2

Well you could try another approach. Make the case transform serverside and send everything to rails downcase.

I think you can achieve this with either mod_rewrite or mod_spelling.

Answer 3

Though URLs are case-sensitive, if you want to make your routes case-insensitive, there is a dirty hack you can do.

In application_controller.rb put:

rescue_from ActionController::RoutingError do |exception|
 redirect_to request.url.downcase
end

But don't actually do that. You create a redirect loop for any non-existant routes. You really should parse request.request_uri into its components, downcase them, and use them to generate the legit route that you redirect to. As I mentioned right off, this is a dirty hack. However, I think this is better than making your route map ugly and hackish.

Answer 4

I've just has the same problem, and solved it using middelware - have a look here:

http://gehling.dk/2010/02/how-to-make-rails-routing-case-insensitive/

Note: This only applies for Rails 2.3+

• Carsten

Answer 5

yeah, pratik's a douchebag. just monkey-patch it to downcase by default. stupid simple example:

module ActionController
  module Caching
    module Pages
      def cache_page(content = nil, options = nil)
        return unless perform_caching && caching_allowed

        path = case options
          when Hash
            url_for(options.merge(:only_path => true, :skip_relative_url_root => true, :format => params[:format]))
          when String
            options
          else
            request.path
        end

        path = path.downcase

        self.class.cache_page(content || response.body, path)
      end
    end
  end
end