Ruby Can’t open(’http://digg.com/’) « Mike Burns, Coder

Ruby Can’t open(’http://digg.com/’)

This is a bit of a Ruby bug, but it’s so much more of a Digg bug that it’s worth telling the public about:

This code, as of Ruby 1.8.5 and March 29th, 2007, will not work. In fact, it will crash Ruby (which I should report, yes).

require 'open-uri'
open('http://digg.com/robots.txt')

I suspect the crash happens when the timeout thread stops the TCPSocket’s sysread. But the question that brings up is: why would sysread timeout?

Turns out that Digg expects the User-Agent header every time and will not respond properly unless it receives it. (Thanks to Matt Horan for solving this one for me.) So this code works:

require 'open-uri'
open('http://digg.com/robots.txt',
     'User-Agent' => 'yourmom')

This entry was written by Mike Burns and posted on March 29, 2007 at 5:13 am and filed under ruby with tags digg, http, open, open-uri. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

3 Comments

Brian Guthrie

Posted March 29, 2007 at 5:50 pm | Permalink

‘Accepts’ => ‘text/ymml’ # yourmom markup language

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mike-burns

Posted March 29, 2007 at 6:00 pm | Permalink

<snaps>
<snap>When she sits around the house, she sits <em>around</em> the house!</snap>
<snap>She got hit by a parked car!</snap>
</snaps>

Reply
Vamsee

Posted January 2, 2009 at 1:55 pm | Permalink

Thank You. This bug, who ever responsible has been driving me crazy.

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