Question

How can I programmatically turn a class name, FooBar, into a symbol, :foo_bar? e.g. something like this, but that handles camel case properly?

FooBar.to_s.downcase.to_sym

Answer 1

Rails comes with a method called underscore that will allow you to transform CamelCased strings into underscore_separated strings. So you might be able to do this:

FooBar.name.underscore.to_sym

But you will have to install ActiveSupport just to do that, as ipsum says.

If you don’t want to install ActiveSupport just for that, you can monkey-patch underscore into String yourself (the underscore function is defined in ActiveSupport::Inflector):

class String
  def underscore
    word = self.dup
    word.gsub!(/::/, '/')
    word.gsub!(/([A-Z]+)([A-Z][a-z])/,'\1_\2')
    word.gsub!(/([a-z\d])([A-Z])/,'\1_\2')
    word.tr!("-", "_")
    word.downcase!
    word
  end
end