Question

I need to store some simple properties in a file and access them from Ruby.

I absolutely love the .properties file format that is the standard for such things in Java (using the java.util.Properties class)… it is simple, easy to use and easy to read.

So, is there a Ruby class somewhere that will let me load up some key value pairs from a file like that without a lot of effort?

I don’t want to use XML, so please don’t suggest REXML (my purpose does not warrant the ‘angle bracket tax’).

I have considered rolling my own solution… it would probably be about 5-10 lines of code tops, but I would still rather use an existing library (if it is essentially a hash built from a file)… as that would bring it down to 1 line….

---

UPDATE: It’s actually a straight Ruby app, not rails, but I think YAML will do nicely (it was in the back of my mind, but I had forgotten about it… have seen but never used as of yet), thanks everyone!

Answer 1

Is this for a Rails application or a Ruby one?

Really with either you may be able to stick your properties in a yaml file and then YAML::Load(File.open('file')) it.

---

NOTE from Mike Stone: It would actually be better to do:

File.open('file') { |yf| YAML::load(yf) } 

or

YAML.load_file('file') 

as the ruby docs suggest, otherwise the file won’t be closed till garbage collection, but good suggestion regardless 🙂