Question

I’m kinda new to Ruby, so I’m not even sure if what I’m doing is best practice. Right now I am trying to define a function import that resides in a module on something.rb:
require ‘rexml/document’

module MyModule
    def import(file)
        Document.new(File.new(file))
    end
end

I have another file somethingelse.rb that calls on file something.rb that will use function import
require ‘something.rb’

class MyClass
    include MyModule
    def initialize(file)
        @myFile = import(file)
    end
end

The problem only arises when I try to import the module from another file. When I use the module in the same file, everything works according to what you’d expect. The errors I get are:

usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rexml/dtd/elementdecl.rb:8: warning: already initialized constant PATTERN_RE
XMLTest.rb:9: uninitialized constant MyModule (NameError)

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

You need to require the other file you’re trying to load in your first file, Ruby won’t do that for you automatically. So if your module is in a file named “something.rb”:

require "something"

class MyClass
  include MyModule
  def initialize(file)
    @myFile = import(file)
  end
end