[Rails] Encrypt/Decrypt String

Question

Hey everyone,

I have a simple problem for that I'd like to hear your thoughts:

I have this URL in Rails http://example.com/hosts/show/somehost

I'm getting the 'somehost' part via params[:id]. I'm calling URI.encode on 'somehost' but this does not encode '.' characters. Rails won't recognize ID parts with points in it so I tried to replace the points with '%2E' - That works, but Firefox (and I guess other browsers too) changes the '%2E' back to points right after the request. This makes copy&paste impossible and will lead to a lot of problems.

I'd like to encrypt and decrypt the 'somehost' part in an URL-safe way - Any suggestions? I can't call by an numeric primary key because of the underlying architecture. I have to look up by name.

Thank you all very much!

Answer 1

You could use base64 encoding, but it would be better to fix the actual problem you are having. This issue is described here. You need to set a :requirements key for your routes file with a regex that includes the dot.