Question

I’m having some trouble figuring out how to 1) traverse a directory and 2) taking each file (.txt) and saving it as a string. I’m obviously pretty new to both ruby and rails.

I know that I could save the file with f=File.open("/path/*.txt") and then output it with puts f.read but I would rather save it as a string, not .txt, and dont know how to do this for each file.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Jake’s answer is good enough, but each_with_object will make it slightly shorter. I also made it recursive.

def read_dir dir
  Dir.glob("#{dir}/*").each_with_object({}) do |f, h|
    if File.file?(f)
      h[f] = open(f).read
    elsif File.directory?(f)
      h[f] = read_dir(f)
    end
  end
end

When the directory is like:

--+ directory_a
  +----file_b
  +-+--directory_c
  | +-----file_d
  +----file_e

then

read_dir(directory_a)

willl return:

{file_b => contents_of_file_b,
 directory_c => {file_d => contents_of_file_d},
 file_e => contents_of_file_e}