How to encode only unencoded URLs?

Question

ruby

URLs from different sources can be in different forms: somewhere they are already encoded, somewhere they still need to be encoded.
I use

def urlencode(url)
  url = begin
    url = URI(url)
    url
  rescue URI::InvalidURIError
     URI.encode(url)
  end
end

Are there better ways?

Answer 1

Always decode the URL first and then encode again. Decoding an unencoded URL is a non-modifying operation and will not make any changes.