Does ruby have the ability to split a directory string?

Question

In ruby, I'm able to do

File.dirname("/home/gumby/bigproject/now_with_bugs_fixed/32/FOO_BAR_2096.results")

and get

"/home/gumby/bigproject/now_with_bugs_fixed/32"

but now I'd like to split up that directory string into the components, ie something like

["home", "gumby", "bigproject", "now_with_bugs_fixed", "32"]

Is there a way to do that other than using

directory_string.split("/")[1:-1]

Answer 1

There's no built-in function to split a path into its component directories like there is to join them, but you can try to fake it in a cross-platform way:

directory_string.split(File::SEPARATOR)

This works with relative paths and on non-Unix platforms, but for a path that starts with "/" as the root directory, then you'll get an empty string as your first element in the array, and we'd want "/" instead.

directory_string.split(File::SEPARATOR).map {|x| x=="" ? File::SEPARATOR : x}

If you want just the directories without the root directory like you mentioned above, then you can change it to select from the first element on.

directory_string.split(File::SEPARATOR).map {|x| x=="" ? File::SEPARATOR : x}[1..-1]