Strange Symphonies Don’t worry, be happy

Creating File Paths the Easy Way

The Traditional Way

The traditional way to create file paths that are cross platform in Ruby, was to join them up as arguments in a File.join call:
File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '..', '..', 'config', 'database.yml'))

Result:
[block:terminal]"./../../config/database.yml"[/block]

Now thats all nice and everything but if you want to change it, you would have the inconvenience of having to add or remove commas, or single|double quotes, which can be a bit of a hassle.

Prettying it Up

So how about we pretty it up a little?
File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), %w[.. .. config database.yml]))

Result:
[block:terminal]"./../../config/database.yml"[/block]

Now doesn't that look a whole better?

What in the world is %w[...]?

Why does this work just as well?

The %w[...] creates an array of Strings separated by the whitespaces in the list.

%w[.. .. config database.yml]
Result:
[block:terminal]["..", "..", "config", "database.yml"][/block]

But what if you have a space in the file name? Well you can use a backslash as an escape key and presto!

%w[.. .. config a\ file]
Result:
[block:terminal]["..", "..", "config", "a file"][/block]

[block:important]I'm not so sure what this operator is called, and any help giving it a name would be greatly appreciated.[/block]