From: Gareth Adams <gareth.adams@...>
Date: 2007-10-01T19:02:45+09:00
Subject: URI.join inconsistency

I just got stung by  rather annoying feature of URI.join:

irb(main):001:0> URI.join('http://www.example.com/something', 'else').to_s
=> "http://www.example.com/else"

Note that this completely ignores the 'something' in the original URI. I had
assumed that it joined in a similar way to File.join:

irb(main):002:0> File.join('/something', 'else').to_s
=> "/something/else"

I notice that adding a slash works as expected, but why is there a difference?
Is there something in the HTTP spec that defines URI joining like this?

irb(main):001:0> URI.join('http://www.example.com/something/', 'else').to_s
=> "http://www.example.com/something/else"

Maybe this is a case of incomplete documentation not explaining what the join
is actually doing, this doesn't seem to be 'least surprising' approach at the 
moment.