Making ERb (Slightly) Less Ugly

Published 15 October 2008 by Farrel

In researching my previous article on code generation I came across a feature of ERb I’d never known about which makes ERb a bit more pleasing to the eye. Usually when I’ve written ERb template in the past it has looked like

1 <% 5.times do |i| %>
2 <%= i %>) hello
3 <% end %>

but if you instantiate ERb with the correct trim_mode string like so

1 ERB.new( template, nil, "%" )

then you can rewrite the previous template as

1 % 5.times do
2 <%= i %>) hello
3 % end

Farrel Lifson is a lead developer at Aimred.