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.