Corey and I have been seriously tearing apart some URLs in our recent work and found that the standard URI library in ruby just wasn’t cutting it. It didn’t parse and merge exactly like we expected, sometimes even dropping parts of the URL. It also had problems handling special characters in URLs like these: ™ ‘ ’ ° ®. We found the Addressable ruby gem from sporkmonger on git hub. From the description it sounded like exactly what we needed, “Addressable is a replacement for the URI implementation that is part of Ruby’s standard library. It more closely conforms to the relevant RFCs and adds support for IRIs and URI templates.”