In a ruby script, there’s a keyword __END__ that for a long time I thought just marked anything after it as a comment. So I used to use it to store snippets and notes about the script that weren’t really needed inline. Then one day I stumbled across the DATA constant, and wondered what flaming magic it was.

DATA is in fact an IO object, that you can read from (or anything else you’d do with an IO object). It contains all the content after __END__ in that ruby script file*. (It only exists when the file contains __END__, and for the first file ruby invokes though. See footnote for more details.)

How can we use this, and why indeed do I love this fickle constant? I mostly use it for quick scripts where I need to process text data, rather than piping to STDIN.

Given a list of URLs that I want to open in my web browser and look at, I could do the following for instance:

DATA.each_line.map(&:chomp).each do |url|
  `open "#{url}"`
end

__END__
http://google.com/
http://yahoo.com/

which upon running (on a mac) would open all the URLs listed in DATA in my default web browser. (For bonus points, use Launchy for cross-platform compatibility.) Really handy & quick/simple when you’ve got 500+ URLs to open at once to go through. (I once had a job that required me to do this daily. Fun.)

Or given a bunch of CSV data that you just want one column for, you could reach for cut or awk in the terminal, but ruby has a really good CSV library which I trust and know how to use already. Why not just use that & DATA to pull out the field you want?

require "csv"

CSV.parse(DATA, headers: true).each do |row|
  puts row["kName"]
end

__END__
kId,kName,kURL
1,Google UK,http://google.co.uk
2,"Yahoo, UK",http://yahoo.co.uk

# >> Google UK
# >> Yahoo, UK

I find when the data I want to munge is already in my clipboard, and I can run ruby scripts directly from text editors without having to save a file, it saves having to write the data out to a file, have ruby read it back in, etc just to do something with the data. I can just write the script reading from DATA, paste the data in and run it. Which also lets me run it iteratively and build up a slightly more complex script that I don’t want to keep. Then do what I need with the output and close the file without saving it.

* technically DATA is an IO handler to read __FILE__, which has been wound forward to the start of the first line after __END__ in the file. And it only exists for the first ruby file to be invoked by the interpreter.

cat > tmp/data.rb <<RUBY
p DATA.read
__END__
data.rb
RUBY

ruby tmp/data.rb
# => "data.rb\n"

cat > tmp/data-require.rb <<RUBY
require "./tmp/data"
RUBY

ruby tmp/data-require.rb
# => /Users/caius/tmp/data.rb:1:in `<top (required)>': uninitialized constant DATA (NameError)

And because it’s a file handle pointing at the current file, you can rewind it and read the entire ruby script into itself…

$ ruby tmp/readself.rb 
DATA.rewind
print DATA.read

__END__
something goes here