Concatenating strings with variables with Ruby

Question

I am writing a test script that opens a file with a list of URLs without the "www" and "com".

I am trying to read each line and put the line into the URL. I then check to see if it redirects or even exists.

My problem is when I read the line from the file and assign it to a variable. I then do a compare with what's in the URL after loading and what I initially put in there, but it seems to be adding a return after my variable.

Basically it is always saying redirect because it puts "http://www.line\n.com/".

How can I get rid of the "\n"?

counter = 1
    file = File.new("Data/activeSites.txt", "r")
        while (line = file.gets)
                puts "#{counter}: #{line}"
                counter = counter + 1
                browser.goto("http://www." + line + ".com/")

if browser.url == "http://www." + line + ".com/"
                    puts "Did not redirect"
                else
                    puts ("Redirected to " + browser.url)
                    #puts ("http://www." + line + ".com/")
                    puts "http://www.#{line}.com/"
                end

Basically it is always saying redirect because it puts http://www.line and then return .com/

How can I get rid of the return?

Answer 1

Short answer: strip

"text\n   ".strip # => "text"

Long answer:

Your code isn't very ruby-like and could be refactored.

# Using File#each_line, the line will not include the newline character
# Adding with_index will add the current line index as a parameter to the block
File.open("Data/activeSites.txt").each_line.with_index do |line, counter|
  puts "#{counter + 1}: #{line}"

  # You're using this 3 times already, let's make it a variable
  url = "http://#{line}.com"

  browser.goto(url)

  if browser.url == url
    puts "Did not redirect"
  else
    puts ("Redirected to " + browser.url)
    puts url
  end
end

Answer 2

That's because your lines are terminated by a newline. You need to strip it off:

while (line = file.gets)
  line.strip!
  puts "#{counter}: #{line}" 
  # ...

Note that there are better ways of iterating over the lines in a file:

File.foreach("Data/activeSites.txt") do |line|
  # ...
end