URI Gotcha with Ruby 2.2.x

[jamiecobbett]

Applications using this gem need to take care when upgrading to Ruby 2.2.x as it is less tolerant of non-standard URIs and so new and existing content might no longer be parseable by Govspeak.

More detail:

Ruby 2.2 upgrades the URI module in stdlib to support RFC3986. This is a stricter form of URI.parse and means that anywhere we parse URIs that might be invalid, an error will be raised.

Examples found so far include:

• mailto://address links (raises NoMethodError: undefined method 'split' for nil:NilClass
• blank mailto: (raises NoMethodError: undefined method 'split' for nil:NilClass)
• URLs with trailing spaces (raises URI::InvalidURIError: bad URI(is not URI?))

This may or may not be something we can/should fix in Govspeak. The alternative is to be aware when upgrading apps using Govspeak to fix existing content.

@boffbowsh did the hard work to figure this out. For more information, see: alphagov/whitehall#2234

[tekin]

One option is to use Addressable::URI instead of URI - it's less strict when parsing URIs and is more or less a drop in replacement.

[h-lame]

Is there any desire to do what @tekin suggests and replace URI.parse with Addressable::URI.parse to avoid unexpected exceptions?

[jamiecobbett]

Fixed in 3.5.1.