Question

I am looking over the source code for rubygems.org to further understand Rails and how to use it with a functional site.

One question I have is what exactly do these do?:

<%= t 'download_count', :count => number_with_delimiter(@downloads_count) %>
<%= t '.welcome_blurb' %>

Are download_count and .welcome_blurb variables that store the text somewhere? If so, where do I find that and how does it know where to look?

Answer 1

download_count and .welcome_blurb are translated strings, you can find them in the config/locales/ directory in a file with a filename corresponding to the language, in this case en.yml for English:

download_count: https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems.org/blob/master/config/locales/en.yml#L11
.welcome_blurb: https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems.org/blob/master/config/locales/en.yml#L31

The dot before welcome_blurb signifies a lazy lookup, which means that the namespace for the translation defaults to the view you are calling it from, as you’ll see in the en.yml file:

home:
  index:
...
    welcome_blurb: "Welcome to your community RubyGem host."

So .welcome_blurb actually means home.index.welcome_blurb.

See the rails i18n documentation for more details.