Oh, and when adding methods to core classes...

There's this neat pattern of checking to see if it's there first. I'm not sure if this really saves any cycles (I would imagine a few), but may aid in avoiding collisions, at the very least. For example thus:

unless String.instance_methods.include? "_sp_clean"
  class String
    def _sp_clean
      str = self.clone
      str = CGI.escape(str) # Turns spaces into '+' rather than '%20'... we expect that, though
                            # URI.escape allows [=&], etc... which we don't want.
    end
  end
end

...Now I hope that formats nicely when this message posts. : \