Escaping URL &'s when launching browser from Ruby script

Using ruby 1.9.2 I am writing a windows script that intends to launch a browser on a URL that contains a number of parameters. I have tried the various ways of launching a browser process: 'start #{url}` system( "start #{url}" ) ...

My URL contains a number of parameters and the开发者_开发知识库refore contains &'s. The problem is that the &'s seem to be interpreted by the shell and I have not figured out how to escape them such that they are correctly passed to the browser.

Any ideas? Thanks!

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You can use system with several arguments:

Executes command in a subshell. command is one of following forms.
[...]
cmdname, arg1, ...: command name and one or more arguments (no shell)

That would skip the shell completely and bypass the whole escaping issue. Try this:

system('start', url)

I'm not sure how start works with Windows but that should work if it is a separate executable.

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Launchy is also a fantastic gem that allows you to do this in a cross-platform way (in case you want to go beyond Windows).

Example:

require 'rubygems'
require 'launchy'
Launchy.open('http://www.google.com/search?&q=ruby')