Ruby on Rails Snippet for Changing Relative Paths to Absolute

If you have a bunch of text containing relative path hyperlinks, and you’d like to change to them to absolute paths, you might find this snippet helpful.


content = "some text with a <a href='/path/to/relative_link/'>relative link</a>"
link = "http://somedomain.com/"
content.gsub(/=('|")//, '=1*/').gsub(/*//, link.match(/(http|https)://[w.]+//)[0])

The asterisk ‘*’ is a hackey placeholder for the actual link swapped in with the second gsub. If you know of a way to pass in the link without needing the placeholder, awesome – paste it in the comments. Thanks.

1 thought on “Ruby on Rails Snippet for Changing Relative Paths to Absolute”

  1. vague

    You could use either blocks or string interpolation to get rid of the hacky * thing.

    With Interpolation:

    content.gsub(/=('|")//, "=\1#{link.match(/(http|https)://[w.]+//)[0]}./")

    With a block:

    content.gsub(/=('|")//) {|m| "=#$1%s/" % link.match(/(http|https)://[w.]+//)[0]}

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