Question

I’m attempting to build a gem for interacting w/ the Yahoo Placemaker API but I’m running into an issue. When I attempt to run the following code I get:

NameError: uninitialized constant Yahoo::Placemaker::Net
    from /Users/Kyle/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/yahoo-placemaker-0.0.1/lib/yahoo-placemaker.rb:17:in `extract'
    from (irb):4
    from /Users/Kyle/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p290/bin/irb:16:in `<main>'

yahoo-placemaker.rb

require "yahoo-placemaker/version"
require 'json'
require 'ostruct'
require 'net/http'

module Yahoo
  module Placemaker
    def self.extract (text = '')
      host = 'wherein.yahooapis.com'
      payload = {
        'documentContent' => text,
        'appid' => APP_ID,
        'outputType' => 'json',
        'documentType' => 'text/plain'
      }

      req = Net::HTTP::Post.new('/v1/document')
      req.body = to_url_params(payload)
      response = Net::HTTP.new(host).start do |http|
        http.request(req)
      end
      json = JSON.parse(response.body)
      Yahoo::Placemaker::Result.new(json)
    end
  end
end

Answer 1

I have yet to figure out how exactly constant name resolution works in Ruby (I think the rules are a bit messy here), but from my experience it could well be that Net is looked up in the current namespace instead of the global one. Try using the fully qualified name:

::Net::HTTP::Post.new

A similar problem could occur in this line:

Yahoo::Placemaker::Result

You should replace it with either ::Yahoo::Placemaker::Result or better Result (as it lives in the current namespace).