| eRuby | |
| Other Names: | ERB |
| Programming Language: | Ruby |
| Engines: | --> |
| Genre: | Template engine |
| License: | BSD 2-Clause License |
Embedded Ruby (also shortened as ERB) is a templating system that embeds Ruby into a text document. It is often used to embed Ruby code in an HTML document, similar to ASP and JSP, and PHP and other server-side scripting languages. The templating system of eRuby combines Ruby code and plain text to provide flow control and variable substitution, thus making the combined code easier to maintain.[1]
The View module of Ruby on Rails is responsible for displaying the response or output on a browser. In its simplest form, a view can be a piece of HTML code which has some static content. For most applications, just having static content may not be enough. Many Ruby on Rails applications will require dynamic content created by the controller (action method) to be displayed in their view. This is made possible by using Embedded Ruby to generate templates which can contain dynamic content. Embedded Ruby allows ruby code to be embedded in a view document. This code gets replaced with proper value resulted from the execution of the code at run time. But, by having the ability to embed code in a view document, we risk bridging the clear separation present in the MVC frame. It is thus the responsibility of the developer to make sure that there is a clear separation of responsibility among the model, view and controller modules of his/her application.
eRuby allows Ruby code to be embedded within a pair of <% and %> delimiters. These embedded code blocks are then evaluated in-place (they are replaced by the result of their evaluation). Apart from creating web pages, eRuby can also be used to create XML Documents, RSS feeds and other forms of structured text files. eRuby dynamically generates static files based on templates. These functionalities of eRuby can be found in the ERB Library.
Different types of tag markers used in ERB templates are:
<% 4.times do %>
<% end %>In the above example, the text list item gets printed four times. The scriptlet produces no text on its own, it only makes the enclosed statement to run multiple times. The output of above code:
- list item
- list item
- list item
- list item
Other things common in eRuby are simply common in Ruby, such as string substitution with #{string_name}, which is similar in languages such as Perl or PHP.
Newlines in eRuby can be suppressed by adding a hyphen at the beginning of the end tag delimiter. For example:
There are several implementations of eRuby, namely:
erb is an implementation of eRuby written purely in the Ruby programming language and included in the Ruby standard library.[5]
A template can be generated by running a piece of code written using the ERB object. A simple example is as shown below:
The same could be achieved using the below code which does not make use of an ERB object:
The second code snippet changes to the below code:
def initialize(variable1) @variable1 = variable1 end
# Expose private binding method. def get_binding binding endend
example = ERBExample.new(variable1)renderer = ERB.new(template)puts output = renderer.result(example.get_binding)As we can see in the above example, we are exposing the binding object of the class ERBExample. Furthermore, we have used the binding object to access the variables and methods of the class within one of its methods.
The new method of the ERB object takes two more parameters. The second parameter specifies a safety level. By giving a number in the second parameter (max value = 4) one can make the template run in a different thread. The value of the number determines the safety level. At the maximum isolation level, unless the binding object is marked as trusted, ERB cannot use it. The third parameter specify optional modifiers. These can be used to control adding of newlines to the output. For example, to make sure that ERB does not output newlines after tag ends, we can create the ERB object as shown below
To only provide the third parameter and ignore the second parameter, use 0 as the input for second parameter.
ERB has many other methods exposed which can be used to render a template. For full list of APIs exposed by the ERB object, refer to the ERB documentation given in the reference section.
As it has been already explained in the previous sections, the erb is used to generate templates. This is often used to generate web pages or other text files. Usually needs erb to push the output to his or her desired file. To achieve this, we can use the redirection ability provided in the command-line and redirect the output to a file rather than making it print on the standard output.
Linking of third party libraries is achievable by making use of the -r option and providing the name of the library. To remember this functionality, one can remember the Ruby key word require, which does the same functionality as the -r option. The below example uses the IPAddr library.
As we have mentioned about the safety levels in the previous section, one can specify the safety level as a command line argument using the -S option
erubis is an implementation of eRuby implemented in Ruby and also in Java. According to its home page, it runs faster than eRuby and ERb and has several useful options, including alternate tags allowing for valid XML.
ember is a pure Ruby implementation of eRuby for Linux. It allows debugging of eRuby templates, improves their composability, and provides powerful shorthand eRuby directives.
The below table compares the tags available in each of the above implementations[6] [7]
| Simple expression tag | Simple execution tag | Simple comment tag | Ability to configure tag pattern | Short hand notation for tags | > | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
, %xy. | ||||||||||
| , can change tag pattern to anything. ex - | ,as one can change tag patterns. | |||||||||
, %xy. | The content of the tag is evaluated as an eRuby template. | The content of the tag is evaluated as Ruby code and is expected to be a path pointing to a Ruby template file which is read, evaluated, and rendered. | Same as | Treats the enclosed code as a block of Ruby code and (if necessary) appends a do keyword to the body of the tag. |