[BioRuby] use of CGI.escape in Bio::Pubmed.esearch

[Kaustubh Patil]

Hi,

I would like to thank you for the BioRuby library, it is a very useful 
tool. I am doing some literature mining using Ruby and I use PubMed as 
my source. Here is some background for my question;

It is not possible to search PubMed with logical operators, e.g.  
HIV+AND+drug or geneA+OR+geneB etc. using Bio::PubMed.esearch (it 
returns empty result).

It is due to the url encoding (i.e. CGI.escape) of the search term 
(approx. line 89 in pubmed.rb). If we remove this url encoding it is 
possible to make such queries.

Now my question is, is it safe to remove this CGI.escape ?

Thank you and regards,
Kaustubh Patil