Last night was my first time actually reading and learning about Ruby. I got the famous Pickaxe book and started things out. I'm really surprised at how easy the language makes things for me as a developer. It just lets me do things, without getting in the way. Definitely a breath of fresh air after working for more than 3 years exclusively with C#.

From here on out all of my Ruby posts, I'll be using Ruby 1.8 (got this using the ruby -v terminal command) and Linux Mint.

This is what we're going to parse:

Year,Make,Model,Length
1997,Ford,E350,2.34
2000,Mercury,Cougar,2.38
2003,Saturn,Ion,2.35

First, let's create a Car class, think of this as a simple data holder object.

class Car
  attr_accessor :year, :make, :model, :length
  
  def initialize(year, make, model, length)
    @year = year
    @make = make
    @model = model
    @length = length
  end
  
  def to_s
    "Year: #{@year} | Make: #{@make} | Model: #{@model} | Length: #{@length}"
  end
end

The 'to_s' function allows us to sculpt what we want to output to the terminal when we call a Car object via the 'puts' command. If you're coming from a C# background, this is similar to overriding the ToString() method when you're trying to debug something.

Next, let's read the information from the CSV file and load our car objects.

#This is similar to C#'s using statements.
require 'csv'

cars = Array.new
CSV.foreach('/home/stapiagutierrez/Desktop/Pickaxe/cars.csv') do |row|
  cars << Car.new(*row)
end

We're telling Ruby to get each row in the CSV file, assign it to the temporary variable 'row' and then using a splat operator we assign it to the car object.

What, were you expecting more? Nope, this is all you need. I'm a firm believer that less code = less bugs; so Ruby seems to fit in very well with me.

Let's display our fetched cars, shall we?

cars.each do |car|
  puts car  
end

Haha! Doesn't that code just make you giddy? :)

Here's the entire code block for you to check out:

class Car
  attr_accessor :year, :make, :model, :length
  
  def initialize(year, make, model, length)
    @year = year
    @make = make
    @model = model
    @length = length
  end
  
  def to_s
    "Year: #{@year} | Make: #{@make} | Model: #{@model} | Length: #{@length}"
  end
end

require 'csv'

cars = Array.new
CSV.foreach('/home/stapiagutierrez/Desktop/Pickaxe/cars.csv') do |row|
  cars << Car.new(*row)
end

cars.each do |car|
  puts car  
end

I'll be posting more and more Ruby related things as I come across them, so hopefully we can learn together. If you're an intermediate or advanced Ruby programmer please let me know if there is a more ruby-esque way to do things, I'm eager to learn! :D