Question

Sometimes I found myself need to open a file, read it content and do some functional manipulation and store the data to an variable. This would end up with the following line of code:

@some_vars = File.open("items.txt").read.chomp!.split(',')

I have two questions here:

• Does the File instance File.open() closed after this line?
• How to close such a File instance without sacrificing the readability?

Answer 1

No, File.open leaves the file handle open. You should use IO.read instead, which returns the entire contents of the file and closes it when it’s done:

IO.read("items.txt").chomp!.split(',')

This is bit shorter for one-liners than passing a block to File.open.