Ruby Best Practices

Conclusions

When dealing with text processing and file management in Ruby, there are a few things to keep in mind. Most of the pitfalls you can run into while doing this sort of work tend to have to do with performance, platform dependence, or code that doesn’t clean up after itself.

In this chapter, we talked about a couple of standard libraries that can help keep things clean and platform-independent. Though Ruby is a fine language to write shell scripts in, there is often no need to resort to code that will run only on certain machines when a pure Ruby solution is just as clean. For this reason, using libraries such as tempfile, pathname, and fileutils will go a seriously long way toward keeping your code portable and maintainable down the line.

For issues of performance, you can almost always squeeze out extra speed and minimize your memory footprint by processing your data line by line rather than slurping everything into a single string. You can also much more effectively find a needle in the haystack if you form well-crafted regular expressions that don’t make Ruby work too hard. The techniques we’ve shown here serve as reminders about common mistakes that even seasoned Rubyists tend to make, and provide good ways around them.

Text processing and file management can quickly become complex, but with a solid grasp of the fundamental strategies, you can use Ruby as an extremely powerful tool that works faster and more effectively than you might imagine.