Can you remove the _snowman in Rails 3?

Question

I'm building an app on Rails 3 RC. I understand the point behind the _snowman param (http://railssnowman.info/)...however, I have a search form which makes a GET request to the index. Therefore, submitting the form is creating the following query string:

?_snowman=☃&search=Box

I don't know that supporting UTF encoding is as important as a clean query string for this particular form. (Perhaps I'm just too much of a perfectionist...hehe) Is there some way to remove the _snowman param for just this form? I'd rather not convert the form to a POST request to hide the snowman, but I'd also prefer it not be in my query string. Any thoughts?

Answer 1

I believe the snowman has to be sent over the wire to ensure your data is being encoded properly, which means you can't really remove the snowman input from forms. Since, it's being sent in your GET request, it will have to be appended to the URL.

I suppose you could write some javascript to clean up the URL once the search page loads, or you could setup a redirect to the equivalent URL minus the snowman. Both options don't really feel right to me.

Also, it doesn't seem there is any way to configure Rails to not output it. If you really wanted to get rid of it, you could comment out those lines in Rails' source (the committed patches at the bottom of railssnowman.info should lead you to the files and line numbers). This adds some maintenance chores for you when you upgrade Rails. Perhaps you can submit a patch to be able to turn this off?

EDIT: Looks like they just switched it to what looks like a checkmark instead of a snowman.

EDIT: Oops, back to a snowman.