Roblog

Ruby’s $_ variable

Ruby has many cryptic variables, but one of them is particularly useful – especially if you’re processing text from the command line.

Ruby regular expressions: the /o modifier

An explanation of the little-used – but handy-to-know – o modifier to Ruby’s regular expressions.

Real progress in long-running command-line scripts

Sometimes, you write Ruby scripts that take a long time to execute. Here’s how to show progress to your scripts’ users – part two in a series, this time showing how to display real progress to users.

Faking progress in long-running command-line scripts

Sometimes, you write Ruby scripts that take a long time to execute. Here’s how to show progress to your scripts’ users – part one in a series, this time dealing with how to show indeterminate, faked progress to reassure users that something is happening.

Persisting data in Ruby with PStore

Ruby comes with a powerful persistent storage system that’s backed by flat files and handles concurrent access and transactions out of the box – stuff you’d expect to need a database for. It’s criminally underused, and it’s called PStore. Never roll your own file locking code again!

Paths aren't strings

If you find yourself passing around lots of file paths in your Ruby scripts, you should save yourself a headache and use Pathnames, not strings.

Nokogiri as a command-line tool

Most Rubyists are familiar with [Nokogiri][]. It’s a combination XML and HTML parsing tool most commonly used for “screen scraping”: that is, fetching a web page, and searching through it to extract information of interest. When a website you’re interested in doesn’t offer an API, it’s often the only way to extract information from it.

ARGF in Ruby

Ruby has a construct, inherited from Perl, that makes it easy to write scripts that work with input from both files and standard input. It’s called ARGF, and here’s how to use it.

Ruby's -e, -n and -p switches

Ruby inherits lots of goodness from Perl. One of those things is the ability to invoke it in one-liners from the command line, and when you do so there are three switches that come in handy. Here’s how to use them.

Accessing WordPress from Ruby: Part III

The final article in a series on accessing WordPress data from within Ruby scripts, using ruby-wpdb.

Accessing WordPress from Ruby: Part II

More examples of ways to use ruby-wpdb to access WordPress data from within Ruby scripts.

Accessing WordPress from Ruby: Part I

An introduction to ruby-wpdb, and how to use it to access WordPress data from Ruby.

Clarifying lambdas

Blocks in Ruby are great. But sometimes, using named lambdas can be intention-revealing in a useful way. Here’s how.