Open an IO stream from a local file or url

ruby stream
csexton picture csexton · Nov 4, 2008 · Viewed 82.1k times · Source

I know there are libs in other languages that can take a string that contains either a path to a local file or a url and open it as a readable IO stream.

Is there an easy way to do this in ruby?

Answer

Aaron Hinni picture Aaron Hinni · Nov 5, 2008

open-uri is part of the standard Ruby library, and it will redefine the behavior of open so that you can open a url, as well as a local file. It returns a File object, so you should be able to call methods like read and readlines.

require 'open-uri'
file_contents = open('local-file.txt') { |f| f.read }
web_contents  = open('http://www.stackoverflow.com') {|f| f.read }

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