Category Archives: Ruby off Rails

Useless Ruby Tricks: DATA and __END__

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So maybe not totally useless certainly fun. Normally, ruby scripts are finished when you reach the end of a file; however, this is not always the case. You can end your script sooner by using the __END__ keyword in your script. Once added, everything you type after that will not be parsed by ruby.

So what?

Well, you can use the global variable DATA to get the contents of what you wrote after the __END__ block. DATA is actually a File object to just that piece of text in your script.

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Converting ERB to HAML snippet

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I’m playing around with merb so I’m using merb-gen to create some basic scaffolding; however, I’m not using ERB, the default rendering engine, I want to use haml

Haml comes with a script, html2haml, which can take HTML with ERB and convert it nicely to haml. Seeing as I would have to run that command more than once, I have a little command snippet that I like to use to aid with the conversion.

$ find . -name '*erb' | \
xargs ruby -e 'ARGV.each { |i| puts "html2haml -r #{i} #{i.sub(/erb$/,"haml")}"}'

That will print out what the html2haml commands would be, it does *not* run the command. I do that step such that I can review what will be converted. If I like what’s going to be done, then I just run that command and pipe it into bash…like so

$ find . -name '*erb' | \
xargs ruby -e 'ARGV.each { |i| puts "html2haml -r #{i} #{i.sub(/erb$/,"haml")}"}' | \
bash

If you like it, it probably wouldn’t hurt storing that as a shell script somewhere :)