Ruby, forming API request without implicitly stating each parameter

Question

I'm trying to make a request to a web service (fwix), and in my rails app I've created the following initializer, which works... sorta, I have two problems however:

1. For some reason the values of the parameters need to have +'s as the spaces, is this a standard thing that I can accomplish with ruby? Additionally is this a standard way to form a url? I thought that spaces were %20.

2. In my code how can I take any of the options sent in and just use them instead of having to state each one like query_items << "api_key=#{options[:api_key]}" if options[:api_key]

The following is my code, the trouble area I'm having are the lines starting with query_items for each parameter in the last method, any ideas would be awesome!

require 'httparty'
module Fwix
  class API
    include HTTParty

    class JSONParser < HTTParty::Parser
      def json
        JSON.parse(body)
      end
    end

    parser JSONParser
    base_uri "http://geoapi.fwix.com"

    def self.query(options = {})
      begin
        query_url = query_url(options)
        puts "querying: #{base_uri}#{query_url}"
        response = get( query_url )
      rescue
        raise "Connection to Fwix API failed" if response.nil?
      end
    end

    def self.query_url(input_options = {})
      @defaults ||= {
        :api_key => "my_api_key",
      }

      options = @defaults.merge(input_options)
      query_url = "/content.json?"
      query_items = []
      query_items << "api_key=#{options[:api_key]}" if options[:api_key]
      query_items << "province=#{options[:province]}" if options[:province]
      query_items << "city=#{options[:city]}" if options[:city]
      query_items << "address=#{options[:address]}" if options[:address]

      query_url += query_items.join('&')
      query_url
    end
  end
end

Answer 1

def self.query_url(input_options = {})
  options = {
    :api_key => "my_api_key",
  }.merge(input_options)

  query_url = "/content.json?"
  query_items = []

  options.each { |k, v| query_items << "#{k}=#{v.gsub(/\s/, '+')}" }

  query_url += query_items.join('&')
end

Answer 2

For 1) You API provider is expecting '+' because the API is expecting in a CGI formatted string instead of URL formatted string.

require 'cgi'
my_query = "hel lo"
CGI.escape(my_query)

this should give you

"hel+lo" 

as you expect

for Question 2) I would do something like

query_items = options.keys.collect { |key| "#{key.to_s}=#{options[key]}" }

Answer 3

I'm a developer at Fwix and wanted to help you with your url escaping issue. However, escaping with %20 works for me:

wget 'http://geoapi.fwix.com/content.xml?api_key=mark&province=ca&city=san%20francisco&query=gavin%20newsom'

I was hoping you could provide me with the specific request you're making that you're unable to escape with %20.