Ruby on Rails. Unicode Routes

Ruby on Rails. Unicode routes

Intereting, I think Rails need a patch for this. I shall speak with someone from core about it later. In the meantime, the following should work:

PublishingHouse::Application.routes.draw do
  resources :magazines,
    :only => :index,
    :path => Rack::Utils.escape('журналы') # a Unicode string is set as a segment of the path
end

Rails 3: Umlauts (or other unicode) in routes

Use your first idea with CGI.escape("bonitätsauskunft").downcase

It will work with any browser. It don't depend on browser encoding, but SERVER encoding. When you use another server (webrick), routes could need to be changed.

I'm using this type of "unicode" routes successfully for some time and it really has good SEO effect.

Unicode routes.rb and Passenger vs. Mongrel/WEBrick Options

This is a known passenger issue.

To work around it, you need to use the following:

match "記事" => "articles#index"
match "記事/:id" => "articles#show"
resources :articles, :path => Rack::Utils.escape("記事") 

This will ensure articles_path will generate the escaped routes, while still responding to the unescaped passenger ones.

Unicode issues with acts_as_taggable_on_steroids

See ToASCII and ToUnicode in this Wikipedia article. I hope the article has enough pointers to resolve your question.

Edit: Though it talks Python, Unicode and permalinks can give an idea about how to encode a solution to your question. To summarize:

Basically, the Unicode URL is encoded in UTF8 and each byte of the UTF8-encoded string is encoded using percent encoding. The browser apparently recognized this specific encoding scheme (which isn’t documented anywhere I could fine) and displays nice internationalized URLs for the user.

Sorry, I've no idea if Rails has a ready-made function to encode URLs this way.

Rails routes with specific character

From Uniform Resource Locators (URL)

The character "#" is unsafe and should always be encoded because it is
used in World Wide Web and in other systems to delimit a URL from a
fragment/anchor identifier that might follow it.

You can't use # symbol in your url because it's a reserved character.

You might have seen the usage of symbol like this

https://www.google.com/search?q=hello+world#brs

But this symbol used here as fragment delimeter.

Rails Routes - Id and name with spaces replaced with hyphens

The strategy here is to treat the name in the URL like a throw-away variable, since it's not being used as an identifier. Notice that in StackOverflow you can type any name you want, and as long as the id is correct you'll get the page you want. So we can do that too:

1. Define the normal routes using resources :clients so you can go to /clients/1
2. Define a another route get 'clients/:id/:name', to: 'clients#show', as: :client_name. This lets you go to /clients/1/anything-you-want and it will hit the show action in ClientsController with id: 1 and name: "anything-you-want".
3. Define a method to generate the url-name from the user's name. For simplicity I'll assume you have defined User#url_name, but it might make more sense to define url_name(client) in a helper since it's not really relevant to the model.
4. In your app, use client_name_path(@client.id, @client.url_name); e.g., client_name_path(1, "john-doe"). This url-helper name is defined by our choice to use as: :client_name in the route. The return value of this call should be "/clients/1/john-doe", which we have already routed to the ClientsController#show action.

So far, links in your app will have the correct URL, but a user could still type in any name in the URL and it would persist in the address bar (even though the page would be fine). If you want to go further like StackOverflow and actually change the url to the correct name you might try in ClientsController#show, to redirect_to client_name_path(@client.id, @client.url_name) if params[:name] != @client.url_name. Just be careful with that to not get yourself into an infinite loop.

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