Category: Methods

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is a protocol, which handles sending e-mail and routing e-mail between mail servers. Ruby provides Net::SMTP class for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) client-side connection and provides two class methods new and start. An SMTP object has an instance method called sendmail, which will typically be used to do the work of mailing…

Ruby is a general-purpose language; it can’t properly be called a web language at all. Even so, web applications and web tools in general are among the most common uses of Ruby. Not only can you write your own SMTP server, FTP daemon, or Web server in Ruby, but you can also use Ruby for more usual…

This chapter teaches you how to access a database using Ruby. The Ruby DBI module provides a database-independent interface for Ruby scripts similar to that of the Perl DBI module. DBI stands for Database Independent Interface for Ruby, which means DBI provides an abstraction layer between the Ruby code and the underlying database, allowing you to switch…

A regular expression is a special sequence of characters that helps you match or find other strings or sets of strings using a specialized syntax held in a pattern. A regular expression literal is a pattern between slashes or between arbitrary delimiters followed by %r as follows − Syntax /pattern/ /pattern/im # option can be specified %r!/usr/local! # general…

Ruby is a pure object-oriented language and everything appears to Ruby as an object. Every value in Ruby is an object, even the most primitive things: strings, numbers and even true and false. Even a class itself is an object that is an instance of the Class class. This chapter will take you through all the major functionalities related…

The execution and the exception always go together. If you are opening a file, which does not exist, then if you did not handle this situation properly, then your program is considered to be of bad quality. The program stops if an exception occurs. So exceptions are used to handle various type of errors, which…

Ruby provides a whole set of I/O-related methods implemented in the Kernel module. All the I/O methods are derived from the class IO. The class IO provides all the basic methods, such as read, write, gets, puts, readline, getc, and printf. This chapter will cover all the basic I/O functions available in Ruby. For more functions, please refer to Ruby…

Iterators are nothing but methods supported by collections. Objects that store a group of data members are called collections. In Ruby, arrays and hashes can be termed collections. Iterators return all the elements of a collection, one after the other. We will be discussing two iterators here, each and collect. Let’s look at these in detail. Ruby each Iterator…

Ranges occur everywhere: January to December, 0 to 9, lines 50 through 67, and so on. Ruby supports ranges and allows us to use ranges in a variety of ways − Ranges as Sequences The first and perhaps the most natural use of ranges is to express a sequence. Sequences have a start point, an…

The Time class represents dates and times in Ruby. It is a thin layer over the system date and time functionality provided by the operating system. This class may be unable on your system to represent dates before 1970 or after 2038. This chapter makes you familiar with all the most wanted concepts of date and time.…