Question

Let’s say for whatever reason, I am going to define an array variable in a ruby script file that holds all the US states as strings. What is a clean way of doing this? And by clean, I’m not really looking for performance, but more readability.

Here are a couple ways I have tried, but don’t really like:

A single LONG line definition. I don’t care for this because it is very long, or needs to be word wrapped.

states = ["Alabama", "Alaska", "Arizona", "Arkansas", "California", "Colorado", ...]

Another options would be a multiple line definition, pushing strings to the array. This resolves the long lines (width-wise), but I don’t care for the mixed use of assignment and array.push.

states = ["Alabama", "Alaska", "Arizona"]
states.push("Arkansas", "California", "Colorado")
states.push("...")

Yet another option would be single line pushes. This seems consistent, but could be quite long to accomplish.

states = []
states.push("Alabama")
states.push("Alaska")
states.push("Arizona")
states.push("...")

Now, sure, ideally, I would not be hard-coding my array values and should be pulling them from a database or web service, etc. But, for the purpose of the question, let’s assume that the values do not exist anywhere else currently.

Answer 1

Just put them on multiple lines if you like…

states = ["Alabama",
          "Alaska",
          "Arizona",
          "Arkansas",
          "California",
          "Colorado",
          ...]

The key is to end the lines with commas. The following won’t work:

# Does not work!
states = ["Alabama"
          ,"Alaska"
          ,"Arizona"
          ,"Arkansas"
          ,"California"
          ,"Colorado"
          ...]