require 'open-uri'

OpenURI

OpenURI is an easy-to-use wrapper for Net::HTTP, Net::HTTPS and Net::FTP.

It is possible to open an http, https or ftp URL as though it were a file:

URI.open("http://www.ruby-lang.org/") {|f|
  f.each_line {|line| p line}
}

The opened file has several getter methods for its meta-information, as follows, since it is extended by OpenURI::Meta.

URI.open("http://www.ruby-lang.org/en") {|f|
  f.each_line {|line| p line}
  p f.base_uri         # <URI::HTTP:0x40e6ef2 URL:http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/>
  p f.content_type     # "text/html"
  p f.charset          # "iso-8859-1"
  p f.content_encoding # []
  p f.last_modified    # Thu Dec 05 02:45:02 UTC 2002
}

Additional header fields can be specified by an optional hash argument.

URI.open("http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/",
  "User-Agent" => "Ruby/#{RUBY_VERSION}",
  "From" => "foo@bar.invalid",
  "Referer" => "http://www.ruby-lang.org/") {|f|
  # ...
}

The environment variables such as http_proxy, https_proxy and ftp_proxy are in effect by default. Here we disable proxy:

URI.open("http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/", :proxy => nil) {|f|
  # ...
}

See OpenURI::OpenRead.open and URI.open for more on available options.

URI objects can be opened in a similar way.

uri = URI.parse("http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/")
uri.open {|f|
  # ...
}

URI objects can be read directly. The returned string is also extended by OpenURI::Meta.

str = uri.read
p str.base_uri

OpenURI Reference