Ruby: Escape, Unescape, Encode, Decode, HTML, XML, URI, URL

This example will show you how to escape and un-escape a value to be included in a URI and within HTML.

require 'cgi'# escapename = "ruby?"value = "yes"url = "http://example.com/?" + CGI.escape(name) + '=' + CGI.escape(value) + "&var=T"# url: http://example.com/?ruby%3F=yes&var=Thtml = %(<a href="#{CGI.escapeHTML(url)}">example</a>)# html: <a href="http://example.com/?ruby%3F=yes&amp;var=T">example</a># unescapename_encoded = html.match(/http:([^"]+)/)[0]# name_encoded: http://example.com/?ruby%3F=yes&amp;var=Thref = CGI.unescapeHTML(name_encoded)# href: http://example.com/?ruby%3F=yes&var=Tquery = href.match(/\?(.*)$/)[1]# query: ruby%3F=yes&var=Tpairs = query.split('&')# pairs: ["ruby%3F=yes", "var=T"]name, value = pairs[0].split('=').map{|v| CGI.unescape(v)}# name, value: ["ruby?", "yes"]