Andrew Chalkley the (Micro) Blog

Introducing RubyHelpers

I am pleased to announce RubyHelpers gem.

When building lightweight Ruby apps in Sinatra and the like, I often need some extra functionality that Ruby doesn’t have baked in. I end up repeating snippets of code hear and there. I thought I’d bundle it in a gem for my own use and contribute it to the Ruby community.

I have extended Object to include the blank? similar to that found in Rails. For example “”.blank?, nil.blank?, {}.blank?, [].blank? etc

I have extended String to have to_html to use RedCloth to convert textile to (X)HTML. For example “h1. *Hello World*”.to_html would produce “<h1><strong>Hello World</strong></h1>”

I have extended Hash to have dot notation to access values via keys and to have {key}_exists? method too. For example person.first_name instead of person[“first_name”], person.phone_numbers.office person.phone_numbers.mobile_exists?

The Hash extension is really handy after parsing a JSON object. It feels so much nicer to access values via dot notation.

So start using it in your projects:

sudo gem install rubyhelpers

Check out the docs and contribute other RubyHelpers on good old GitHub.




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