What is a clean way of defining an array of strings in Ruby?

Question

Let's say for whatever reason, I am going to define an array variable in a ruby script file that holds all the US states as strings. What is a clean way of doing this? And by clean, I'm not really looking for performance, but more readability.

Here are a couple ways I have tried, but don't really like:

A single LONG line definition. I don't care for this because it is very long, or needs to be word wrapped.

states = ["Alabama", "Alaska", "Arizona", "Arkansas", "California", "Colorado", ...]

Another options would be a multiple line definition, pushing strings to the array. This resolves the long lines (width-wise), but I don't care for the mixed use of assignment and array.push.

states = ["Alabama", "Alaska", "Arizona"]
states.push("Arkansas", "California", "Colorado")
states.push("...")

Yet another option would be single line pushes. This seems consistent, but could be quite long to accomplish.

states = []
states.push("Alabama")
states.push("Alaska")
states.push("Arizona")
states.push("...")

Now, sure, ideally, I would not be hard-coding my array values and should be pulling them from a database or web service, etc. But, for the purpose of the question, let's assume that the values do not exist anywhere else currently.

Answer 1

There's an actual syntax element in ruby for defining such arrays:

> states = %w(Alabama Alaska Arizona
>    Arkansas California
>    Colorado)
=> ["Alabama", "Alaska", "Arizona", "Arkansas", "California", "Colorado"]

Note though, that it will split the elements on whitespace. So an entry like "North Dakota" will end up as two items: "North" and "Dakota".