How to write to file in Ruby?

Question

I need to read the data out of database and then save it in a text file.How can I do that in Ruby? Is there any file management system in Ruby?

Answer 1

Writing to a text file is very easy in Ruby due to the Ruby File class/object. There are a few ways to go about this:

To open and write to a new file you can do something like this:

# Use File.open with the name of the text file and "w" which means Write

# Note: This will rewrite the previous file contents

File.open("output.txt", "w") {|f|

f.write "This is going to be sent to text file!"

}

# OR in a single line you could do:

File.write("output.txt", "some text here!")

To open and write to an existing text file (append), you can do this:

# Use File.open with the name of the text file and "a" which means Append

# Note: This will append the text to the end of the current file contents

File.open("output.txt", "a") {|f|

f.write "This text will be appended to the existing txt file!"

}

# OR in a single line you could do:

File.write("output.txt", "this text will be appended!", mode: "a")

It is also important to note that if you want to take an array or an object of some kind, it has to be converted to a string first before it can be written to a file. There are more Ruby file methods that allow you to do things like check if a file exists, loop through directories on your system, read different files, and more.