What does w array mean

Question

I m looking at the documentation for FileUtils      I m confused by the following line   FileUtils cp  w cgi rb complex rb date rb     usr lib ruby 1 6    What does the  w mean  Can you point me to the documentation

User · Answer

I was given a bunch of columns from a CSV spreadsheet of full names of users and I needed to keep the formatting, with spaces. The easiest way I found to get them in while using ruby was to do:

names = %( Porter Smith
Jimmy Jones
Ronald Jackson).split('\n')

This highlights that %() creates a string like "Porter Smith\nJimmyJones\nRonald Jackson" and to get the array you split the string on the "\n" ["Porter Smith", "Jimmy Jones", "Ronald Jackson"]

So to answer the OP's original question too, they could have wrote %(cgi\ spaeinfilename.rb;complex.rb;date.rb).split(';') if there happened to be space when you want the space to exist in the final array output.

User · Answer

Though it s an old post  the question keep coming up and the answers don t always seem clear to me  so  here s my thoughts    w and  W are examples of General Delimited Input types  that relate to Arrays  There are other types that include  q   Q   r   x and  i   The difference between the upper and lower case version is that it gives us access to the features of single and double quotes  With single quotes and  lowercase   w  we have no code interpolation    someCode   and a limited range of escape characters that work       n   With double quotes and  uppercase   W we do have access to these features   The delimiter used can be any character  not just the open parenthesis  Play with the examples above to see that in effect   For a full write up with examples of  w and the full list  escape characters and delimiters  have a look at  Ruby -  w vs  W     secrets revealed

User · Answer

I think of  w   as a  word array  - the elements are delimited by spaces and it returns an array of strings   There are other   literals     r   is another way to write a regular expression   q   is another way to write a single-quoted string  and can be multi-line  which is useful   Q   gives a double-quoted string  x   is a shell command  i   gives an array of symbols  Ruby    2 0 0   s   turns foo into a symbol   foo    I don t know any others  but there may be some lurking around in there

User · Answer

Excerpted from the documentation for Percent Strings at http   ruby-doc org core doc syntax literals rdoc html label-Percent Strings      Besides        which creates a String  the   may create other types of object  As with strings  an uppercase letter allows interpolation and escaped characters while a lowercase letter disables them       These are the types of percent strings in ruby           w  Array of Strings

User · Answer

There is also  s that allows you to create any symbols  for example    s some words            Same as   some words   s other words           Same as   other words   s last example          Same as   last example    Since Ruby 2 0 0 you also have    i  a b c         gt     a   b   c    i  a b c         gt     a   b   c    i  a b c         gt     a   b   c     etc

User · Answer

W and  w allow you to create an Array of strings without using quotes and commas

User · Answer

w foo bar  is a shortcut for   foo    bar    Meaning it s a notation to write an array of strings separated by spaces instead of commas and without quotes around them  You can find a list of ways of writing literals in zenspider s quickref

User · Answer

Instead of  w   we should use  w    According to Ruby style guide   Prefer  w to the literal array syntax when you need an array of words  non-empty strings without spaces and special characters in them   Apply this rule only to arrays with two or more elements     bad STATES     draft    open    closed      good STATES    w draft open closed    Use the braces that are the most appropriate for the various kinds of percent literals      for array literals  w   i   W   I  as it is aligned with the standard array literals     bad  w one two three   i one two three     good  w one two three   i one two three    For more read here

[ruby] What does %w(array) mean?

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