newbie-Ruby

just for fun and to provide a very new service to our customers, handgestrickt learned Ruby recently. the syntax is simple, highly structured, clearly readable, yet powerful. for people who are used to read cryptic Perl-scripts, Ruby is a real delight.

in the next weeks we will have a look at Ruby On Rails.

inspite of using the Apache mod_ruby to make our Ruby-scripts running on the webserver, we just run them as CGI-scripts by adding the following to the Apache-configuration:

<IfModule mod_mime.c>
    AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .rb
</IfModule>

we do not want to hide our first efforts. the following script reads out the current folder and outputs it to the browser. you can click on a file or folder to open it.

#!/usr/bin/ruby

class Folderview
        #requiring and including necessary modules
        require "erb"
        include ERB::Util
        require "cgi"

        #constructor
        def initialize(folder = nil)
                #default values
                @folders = []
                @files = []
                @folder = "./"
                @cgi_folder = ""
                #if a folder is passed
                if !folder.nil?
                        @folder = add_slash(folder)
                end
                #add the current cgi-values
                @cgi = CGI.new
              if @cgi.has_key?("folder")
                    @folder += add_slash(@cgi["folder"])
                    @cgi_folder = add_slash(@cgi["folder"])
              end
                #read the folder data
              read_data
        end

        #reads the folder data and pushes it into the related arrays
        def read_data
                folder = Dir.new(@folder)
                        while data = folder.read
                                if data !~ /^\./
                                        if File.directory?(@folder+data)
                                                @folders.push(data)
                                        elsif File.file?(@folder+data)
                                                @files.push(data)
                                        end
                                end
                        end
             folder.close
        end

        #output the whole HTML-tree in <pre>-tags
        def output_html
                puts "Content-Type: text/html\n\n"
                puts "<pre>\n"
                output_folders
                output_files
                puts "</pre>\n"
        end

        #outputs the folders one by one
        def output_folders
                @folders.each do |folder|
                        puts "<a href=\"#{ENV["SCRIPT_NAME"]}?folder=#{url_encode(@cgi_folder+folder)}\">#{html_escape(folder)}</a>\n";
                end
        end

        #outputs the files one by one
        def output_files
                @files.each do |file|
                        puts "<a href=\"#{@folder}#{url_encode(file)}\">#{html_escape(file)}</a>\n";
                end
        end

        #adds a slash to folder names if necessary
        def add_slash(folder)
                if folder !~ /\/$/
                        folder += "/"
                end
                return folder
        end

        #access rules
        public :initialize, :output_html
        private :add_slash, :read_data, :output_folders, :output_files
end

view = Folderview.new
view.output_html
exit