Ruby Net::HTTP - following 301 redirects

301 redirects are fairly common if you do not type the URL exactly as the web server expects it. They happen much more frequently than you'd think, you just don't normally ever notice them while browsing because the browser does all that automatically for you.

Two alternatives come to mind:

1: Use open-uri

open-uri handles redirects automatically. So all you'd need to do is:

require 'open-uri' 
...
response = open('http://xyz...').read

If you have trouble redirecting between HTTP and HTTPS, then have a look here for a solution:
Ruby open-uri redirect forbidden

2: Handle redirects with Net::HTTP

def get_response_with_redirect(uri)
   r = Net::HTTP.get_response(uri)
   if r.code == "301"
     r = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse(r['location']))
   end
   r
end

If you want to be even smarter you could try to add or remove missing backslashes to the URL when you get a 404 response. You could do that by creating a method like get_response_smart which handles this URL fiddling in addition to the redirects.

I can't figure out how to comment on the accepted answer (this question might be closed), but I should note that r.header is now obsolete, so r.header['location'] should be replaced by r['location'] (per https://stackoverflow.com/a/6934503/1084675 )

Here is the code I came up with (derived from different examples) which will bail out if there are too many redirects (note that ensure_success is optional):

require "net/http"
require "uri"
class Net::HTTPResponse
  def ensure_success
    unless kind_of? Net::HTTPSuccess
      warn "Request failed with HTTP #{@code}"
      each_header do |h,v|
        warn "#{h} => #{v}"
      end
      abort
    end
  end
end
def do_request(uri_string)
  response = nil
  tries = 0
  loop do
    uri = URI.parse(uri_string)
    http = Net::HTTP.new(uri.host, uri.port)
    request = Net::HTTP::Get.new(uri.request_uri)
    response = http.request(request)
    uri_string = response['location'] if response['location']
    unless response.kind_of? Net::HTTPRedirection
      response.ensure_success
      break
    end
    if tries == 10
      puts "Timing out after 10 tries"
      break
    end
    tries += 1
  end
  response
end