Nov 7, 2022 1 min read TIL

TIL: English Ruby

Banishing cryptic constant names

Photo by Johnny Briggs / Unsplash

Ruby has a stdlib module called English that gives you meaningful names as aliases for the cryptic built-in globals.

All you need to do is:

require 'English'

(Yes, that's a require with a titlised module name)

Constant	Alternative
`$!`	`$ERROR_INFO`
`$@`	`$ERROR_POSITION`
`$;`	`$FIELD_SEPARATOR`
`$,`	`$OUTPUT_FIELD_SEPARATOR`
`$/`	`$INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR`
`$\`	`$OUTPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR`
`$.`	`$INPUT_LINE_NUMBER`
`$_`	`$LAST_READ_LINE`
`$>`	`$DEFAULT_OUTPUT`
`$<`	`$DEFAULT_INPUT`
`$$`	`$PROCESS_ID`
`$?`	`$CHILD_STATUS`
`$~`	`$LAST_MATCH_INFO`
`$=`	`$IGNORECASE`
`$*`	`$ARGV`
`$&`	`$MATCH`
$`	`$PREMATCH`
`$'`	`$POSTMATCH`
`$+`	`$LAST_PAREN_MATCH`