Learn to Program, 2nd Edition

Saving and Loading for Grown-Ups

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, ...