Ruby: auto quote string, not other data, when writing to file?
I am writing a small library that writes data to a file. some of the data is strings, some of it is not - things like boolean (true / false) values ...
when I have a string for data, I want to write the string to a file with quotes around it. so a string like "this is a data string" will be written to the file with quotes around it.
when I have other data types like booleans, I want to write boolean to a file without quotes around it. so false will be written as false - no quotes around it.
is there a way to automatically specify / not specify the value of a variable depending on whether the variable containing the value is a string when written to a file?
The simplest is #inspect
-------------------------------------------------- ------- Object # inspect
obj.inspect => string
-------------------------------------------------- ----------------------
Returns a string containing a human-readable representation of
_obj_. If not overridden, uses the + to_s + method to generate the
string.
[1, 2, 3..4, 'five'] .inspect # => "[1, 2, 3..4, \" five \ "]"
Time.new.inspect # => "Wed Apr 09 08:54:39 CDT 2003"
You can check it on IRB.
irb> "hello".inspect
#=> "\"hello\""
irb> puts _
"hello"
#=> nil
irb> true.inspect
#=> "true"
irb> puts _
true
#=> nil
irb> (0..10).to_a.inspect
#=> "[0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]"
irb> puts _
[0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
#=> nil
But for generic types, you might consider YAML or JSON.
This is one way to do it:
if myvar.class == String
#print with quotes
else
#print value
end
Have you tried using kind_of ?.
Example:
variable.kind_of? String
Let's assume your data is of text type, then do
data.match(/true|false/).nil? ? "'#{data}'" : data
should be what you want.