URL Decoding with Ruby on the Command Line

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When working with URLs that contain other URLs (such as a redirect_uri in an OAuth2 authorization request), you may get annoyed when you can't decode the encoded URL off the top of your head. I couldn't find an easy command-line tool to do this for me, so have resorted to trusty Ruby.

Following the advice from this Stack Overflow answer, we can use CGI.unescape, and create a nice command-line one-liner:

ruby -rcgi -e 'puts CGI.unescape(ARGF.read)'

This lets us i.e. run:

$ echo 'https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jvt.me' | ruby -rcgi -e 'puts CGI.unescape(ARGF.read)'
https://www.jvt.me

Written by Jamie Tanna's profile image Jamie Tanna on , and last updated on .

Content for this article is shared under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International, and code is shared under the Apache License 2.0.

#blogumentation #ruby #command-line.

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