Ruby in a Nutshell

eRuby

eRuby stands for embedded Ruby; it’s a tool that embeds fragments of Ruby code in other files such as HTML files. Here’s a sample eRuby file:

This is sample eRuby file<br>
The current time here is <%=Time.now%>.
<%[1,2,3].each{|x|print x,"<br>\n"}%>

Here’s the output from this sample file:

This is sample eRuby file<br>
The current time here is Wed Aug 29 18:54:45 JST 2001.
1
2
3

There are two eRuby implementations:

eruby

The original implementation of eRuby. eruby is available from http://www.modruby.net.

Erb

A pure Ruby (subset) implementation of eRuby.

eRuby is available from http://www2a.biglobe.ne.jp/~seki/ruby/erb-1.3.3.tar.gz; The version number may be changed in the future. Unfortunately, the supporting page http://www2a.biglobe.ne.jp/~seki/ruby/ is in Japanese, but you can tell how to use it from its source code.