Month: July 2007

Making Configuration Files with YAML

Update: A newer version of how I load YAML into configuration files in my projects can be found here.

Since being introduced to YAML I’ve loved using it for configuration files in both Ruby and Ruby on Rails. YAML means “YAML Ain’t Markup Language”. Yes, there is an infinite loop in the title – it’s programmer humor. Those of you familiar with Ruby on Rails are somewhat familiar with YAML because that is the format of the database.yml configuration file. So this is a sample of what a YAML file typically looks like:

development:
	adapter: mysql
	database: project_development
	username: root
	password:
	socket: /tmp/mysql.sock

This is a snippet out of the database.yml file. But one of the great things about Ruby is that writing code to read YAML is extremely simple. Let’s say I want to make a website configuration file, this is what that might look like:

config:
	title: My Rails Website
	author: Santa Claus
	email: email@company.com
	css_file: default.css

The hardest part is thinking about what type of information you want to store in your configuration, the Ruby is extremely easy. Check it out…

First we require the YAML library:

require 'yaml'

Ok, now we can make a read_config method:

def read_config
	config = YAML.load_file("config.yaml")
	@title = config["config"]["title"]
	@author = config["config"]["author"]
	@email = config["config"]["email"]
	@css_file = config["config"]["css_file"]
end

Seriously, that’s it (of course you need to execute the method). We just load the YAML into a local variable. Then we spider down the YAML document using the local variable that we assigned the loaded YAML document. So where you see “config” in quotes that is referring to the “config:” within the YAML document. Of course, were I say “config.yaml” you would actually put the path to your specific YAML document. One the information is loaded, I pull the data I want into a few instance variables making them accessible to my views (in Rails).

Update:

A more efficient way to do this would be to loop through the hash that is created by the read_config method and just set the key to an instance variable, like so:

config["config"].each { |key, value| instance_variable_set("@#{key}", value) }

Update: A newer version of how I load YAML into configuration files in my projects can be found here.

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Formatting Names Using Ruby

Getting information from users is a common task that we have to deal with in building an application. This typically happens either in creating a user account, commerce orders, or any other time when the application has to ask “who are you?”. Often times we’ll create a field for both a firstname and a lastname allowing the user to separate their names to make it easier for us (the application developer) to display either/or both. In this post, I’m going to talk about how we can format full names given to the application by the user without necessarily worrying about creating two textfields. Of course, you would use this code in the methods within a Rails app.

So let’s say I have a variable for creative purposes, I’ll call it ‘name’ and ‘name’ has a value.

name = “James Earl Jones”

And I want to only display the first and last name of my ‘name’ value I could do this:

names = name.split
firstname = names.first
lastname = names.last

Now this splits the three words in ‘name’ into an array. I then set firstname as the first item from the array, and set lastname as the last item from the array.

Running:
p “#{firstname} #{lastname}”

Would then output:
“James Jones”

How about we do another common formatting task we can to show the last name first separated with a comma the rest of the name, we could do this:

names = name.split
lastname = names.pop
firstname_remaining = names.join(‘ ‘)

Here we split the name up again, put then ran the pop method which pulls the last time of the array out of the array and then returns it. This would leave only the remaining name left to work with as the firstname_remaining variable. I them join the rest of the array with spaces for the firstname_remaining (which would include the first name and any remain name information like a middle name).

Running:
p “#{lastname}, #{firstname_remaining}”

Would then output:
“Jones, James Earl”

Lastly, a common thing I’ve been seeing lately is the usage of the last initial when showing a user’s name. We could do something like this:

names = name.split
firstname = names.first
lastinitial = names.last[0,1]

Here I’m introducing some trimming for the lastinitial variable. You see this with a bracket and two numbers. The first number is the offset in the string that I’m trimming (zero is the first letter is a string), the next number is how many characters I’m showing from that offset.

Running:
p “#{firstname} #{lastinitial}.”

Would then output:
“James J.”

So that’s it for now. Of course you might think about adapting this to users that will have items at the end of their name like “Jr.” – this can sometimes just be solved using a drop-down.  I’m hoping that perhaps I have introduced you to some things in Ruby that you might have been previously unaware of. Until next time.