String concatenation in Ruby

Question

I am looking for a more elegant way of concatenating strings in Ruby.

I have the following line:

source = \"#{ROOT_DIR}/\" << project <<          


        

Answer 1

I'd prefer using Pathname:

require 'pathname' # pathname is in stdlib
Pathname(ROOT_DIR) + project + 'App.config'

about << and + from ruby docs:

+: Returns a new String containing other_str concatenated to str

<<: Concatenates the given object to str. If the object is a Fixnum between 0 and 255, it is converted to a character before concatenation.

so difference is in what becomes to first operand (<< makes changes in place, + returns new string so it is memory heavier) and what will be if first operand is Fixnum (<< will add as if it was character with code equal to that number, + will raise error)

Answer 2

For your particular case you could also use Array#join when constructing file path type of string:

string = [ROOT_DIR, project, 'App.config'].join('/')]

This has a pleasant side effect of automatically converting different types to string:

['foo', :bar, 1].join('/')
=>"foo/bar/1"

Answer 3

If you are just concatenating paths you can use Ruby's own File.join method.

source = File.join(ROOT_DIR, project, 'App.config')

Answer 4

You can also use % as follows:

source = "#{ROOT_DIR}/%s/App.config" % project

This approach works with ' (single) quotation mark as well.