From: Alex Fenton <alex@...>
Date: 2007-06-11T18:00:30+09:00
Subject: Re: Relative/absolute url parsing

Michel ( Dagnan ) wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I have to collect urls from html files, I to transform relative urls to
> absolute, I have to handle for example url beginning with '../' and
> './', which is kind of ennoying :D (my head hurts because of the
> debugging process)

Not sure, but perhaps the standard library will do what you want? 

Assuming that this_page is the URL of the page you're scraping links from and '../qux' is the link URL you want to absolutise:

SCIPIUS:~ alex$ irb 
irb(main):001:0> require 'uri'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> this_page = URI.parse('http://www.abc.org/foo/bar/baz')
=> #<URI::HTTP:0x18c82e URL:http://www.abc.org/foo/bar/baz>
irb(main):003:0> this_page.merge('../qux')
=> #<URI::HTTP:0x303d42 URL:http://www.abc.org/foo/qux>

alex