Reading files into a program using the File class

Ruby does some cool things when it comes to reading from a file, and we will see that in this guide.

In the previous guide, we created a file containing the names of baseball teams. You can ask Ruby to read the contents of this file with the following code line:

teams = File.read("files-lessons/teams.txt") 

If you print the teams variable, your output should be the names of all the teams stored in that file.

Now, let's say we want to do something with the contents of a file. First, we have to separate the values and put them in an array. The code for this task is as follows:

p teams.split 

The split method will look at the string of the text and separate each element that is separated by a space.

If you execute it, you'll see that the values turned into an array:

["Twins,", "Astros,", "Mets,", "Yankees"] 

If you don't like the , symbol after every element in the array, you can remove that too by adding an argument to the split method:

p teams.split...