Question

I have a pdftotext.rb file in /lib and the code is

module Pdftotext
  require 'rubygems'
  require 'docsplit'

  class << self
    def convert
      Docsplit.extract_text("hello.pdf")
    end
  end
end  

I have the hello.pdf file in the /assets folder and I tried “assets/hello.pdf” but it keeps telling me Error: Couldn’t open file ‘/assets/hello.pdf’: No such file or directory.

How can I get the right path to get the file to be converted?

By the way I am using rails 3.2.1, thanks.

Answer 1

Do you mean it is in RAILS_ROOT/assets/hello.pdf?

You should use File.join to get at the file. Like this:

module Pdftotext
  require 'rubygems'
  require 'docsplit'

  class << self
    def convert
      Docsplit.extract_text(File.join(Rails.root, "assets", "hello.pdf"))
    end
  end
end  

Using “/assets/hello.pdf” will try to get it from the file system root.