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Standard File Naming Conventions in Ruby

Asked 2008-10-21T09:44:00.187
55

For a file containing the given class, SomeCoolClass, what would be the proper or standard filename?

 1. somecoolclass.rb
 2. some_cool_class.rb
 3. some-cool-class.rb
 4. SomeCoolClass.rb

or some other variation?

I noticed in the Ruby stdlib, versions 1, 2 and 3 are used.

ruby file naming-conventions conventions
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2 Answers

9

I personally think the hyphen as word separator makes for maximum readability and typability in general, so I recommend that where possible (in some contexts, a hyphen can't be used, such as in identifiers in most languages). One important thing to bear in mind is that the scheme you pick will have a bearing on the require statement that users will use with your lib, and you want to avoid having a different gem name than library name.

Bad 
# gem install my_cool_lib
require 'my-cool-lib'

# gem install MyCoolLib
require 'my_cool_lib'
Good 
# gem install my_cool_lib
require 'my_cool_lib'

# gem install my-cool-lib
require 'my-cool-lib'

Unfortunately, a small handful of libraries violate this simple usability rule. Don't be one of those libraries. :)

answered 2008-10-21T14:53:10.327
6

I would recommend lower case characters with underscores (number 2 in your question). It's true that this naming scheme is the convention in Rails and not necessary in non-Rails projects. However, I would still stick to the Rails convention because most Ruby programmers are probably using Ruby exclusively for Rails anyway.

answered 2008-10-21T11:07:34.293

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