Question

I am new to Ruby.
Below is my naive code to load a single-column CSV file into a Ruby array.

QUESTION: Is there something better?
In particular, how to not hard-code the number of items?

require 'csv'
COUNTRIES = Array.new(240)
i = 0
CSV.foreach "#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/countries.csv" do |country|
  COUNTRIES[i] = country[0]
  i = i + 1
end

Answer 1

Try this:

require 'csv'
countries = CSV.read("#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/countries.csv").flatten