Thursday 30 April 2009

Dehumanizing Rails

So we have a string that has been "humanized" - and all the underscores have been stripped out and replaced by spaces, and it's been nicely capitalised (sorry, make that "capitalize"d). So how do we go back the other way?

Plonk the following into config/initializers/inflections.rb (or if you're using a legacy Rails, drop it onto the end of config/environments.rb).

module ActiveSupport::Inflector
  # does the opposite of humanize.... mostly. Basically does a
  # space-substituting .underscore
  def dehumanize(the_string)
    result = the_string.to_s.dup
    result.downcase.gsub(/ +/,'_')
  end
end
class String
  def dehumanize
    ActiveSupport::Inflector.dehumanize(self)
  end
end

Note: it will not reverse any speccy stuff like adding back any "_id"s etc, but it does mean you can do something along the lines of:
assert_equal "network_type", "Network type".dehumanize

2 comments:

Kamil Kukura said...

Hmm, what about name "computerize".

Taryn East said...

LOL - yep , that's a valid alternative :)