formatting the seeds file

Question

I'm modifying a seed file for a site that is already in existence.

One of the fields in the table I'm changing is a text area.

I would like to format the information I am inputting in the seed file so I don't have to go back and change it manually on the site.

Currently an entry in the seed file looks like this

if !Store.exists?(:title => 'store Cavan')
Store.create(
    opening_hours: 'Mon. to Fri.     8:30 - 9:00PM
                    Saturday         8:30 - 7:00 PM
                    Sunday         11:00 - 7:00 PM',
    latitude: 53,
    longitude: -7,
    title: 'test store Cavan',
    street_line_one: 'test Retail Park',
    street_line_two: 'test Road',
    town: 'Cavan',
    county: 'Cavan',
    country: 'Ireland')

When I run rake db:seed this comes out in an info box like this

Mon. to Fri.     8:30 - 9:00PMSaturday         8:30 - 7:00 PMSunday         11:00 - 7:00 PM

Instead of this

Mon. to Fri.     8:30 - 9:00PM
Saturday         8:30 - 7:00 PM
Sunday         11:00 - 7:00 PM

I have tried add in '\n' in there and "\n" but that breaks my site. I know this is only a small issue but I would like to know how to keep some sort of formatting when I run my seeds, in this case a new line after each time is displayed.

any help is very much appreciated, thanks.

Answer 1

I'd do this with heredoc:

opening_hours = <<-END.gsub(/^\s*/, '')
  Mon. to Fri.     8:30 - 9:00 PM
  Saturday         8:30 - 7:00 PM
  Sunday          11:00 - 7:00 PM
END
=> "Mon. to Fri.     8:30 - 9:00 PM\nSaturday         8:30 - 7:00 PM\nSunday          11:00 - 7:00 PM\n"

You can use any method you like after the opening END, e.g. ruby-dedent to remove the indent (in case you don't like regular expressions). The closing END doesn't have to be at the beginning of the line, the - in front of the opening END means, all whitespace in front of the closing END shall be ignored.

In your case:

Store.create(
  latitude: 53,
  longitude: -7,
  title: 'test store Cavan',
  street_line_one: 'test Retail Park',
  street_line_two: 'test Road',
  town: 'Cavan',
  county: 'Cavan',
  country: 'Ireland',
  opening_hours: <<-END.strip_heredoc
    Mon. to Fri.     8:30 - 9:00 PM
    Saturday         8:30 - 7:00 PM
    Sunday          11:00 - 7:00 PM
  END
)

The strip_heredoc comes with ActiveSupport and yields the same result here as the gsub.

The heredoc has to be the last attribute assigned because to my knowledge, there's no way to have the closing END and a comma on the same line.

Heredocs are just a very nice way to embed formatted data in source code - and Ruby has particularly great support for it. Google it!

Answer 2

\n would definitely work. I am not sure how you used \n and it didn't work out for you. Change your create method call by including \n as below:

Store.create(
    opening_hours: 'Mon. to Fri.     8:30 - 9:00PM\nSaturday         8:30 - 7:00 PM\nSunday         11:00 - 7:00 PM',
    latitude: 53,
    longitude: -7,
    title: 'test store Cavan',
    street_line_one: 'test Retail Park',
    street_line_two: 'test Road',
    town: 'Cavan',
    county: 'Cavan',
    country: 'Ireland')

UPDATE

As per the chat session. OP opted for adding the code in its entirety in html to the seed file to get the correct format.