March 2009
Intermediate to advanced
194 pages
4h
English
Now that you’re good and afraid, let’s get to it. A file is basically just a sequence of bytes. A string is also, ultimately, just a sequence of bytes. This makes saving strings to files pretty easy, at least conceptually. (And Ruby makes it pretty easy in practice.)
Here’s a quick example where we save a simple string to a file and then read it back out again. (I’ll just show you the program first, and then I’ll talk some more about it.)
# The filename doesn't have to end |
# with ".txt", but since it is valid |
# text, why not? |
filename = 'ListerQuote.txt' |
test_string = 'I promise that I swear absolutely that ' + |
'I will never mention gazpacho soup again.' |
# The 'w' here is for write-access to the file, ... |