All posts by Josh Clayton

Testing Elixir Plugs

- Josh Clayton
- May 11, 2016
- Uncategorized

Unit-test your Elixir Plugs with a few quick tips.

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Routing in Elm with Hop and Mailboxes

- Josh Clayton
- May 3, 2016
- Uncategorized

Elegant routing in Elm with Hop.

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Maybe Thinking

By understanding Maybe, you begin to see code in a new light.

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Decorating Arrays in Ember

Leverage Ember.ObjectProxy to introduce decorators into your Ember codebase.

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Rails on Docker

Develop a Rails app in Docker.

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Rails on Docker

Develop a Rails app in Docker.

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Testing and Environment Variables

Learn how to test code using data in environment variables with Climate Control.

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Updated Test-Driven Rails Videos

<p>I’m happy to announce that we’ve updated the content for our popular
<a href="https://upcase.com/test-driven-rails?utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=updated-test-driven-rails-content&utm_source=giantrobots">Test-Driven Rails course</a> on <a href="https://upcase.com/">Upcase</a>. What’s
changed?</p>

<h2>Updated Gems, including Rails 4 and RSpec 3</h2>

<p>We’ve updated the course to take advantage of newer versions of Ruby, Rails,
RSpec…</p>

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Acceptance Tests at a Single Level of Abstraction

<p>Each acceptance test tells a story: a logical progression through a task
within an application. As developers, it’s our responsibility to tell each
story in a concise manner and to keep the reader (either other developers or
our future selves) engaged…</p>

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Speed Up Tests by Selectively Avoiding Factory Girl

Learn one simple way to speed up your tests with the factory_girl gem!

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Parsing YAML 1.1 with Ruby

April 12, 2011

To parse YAML with Ruby, do not use the YAML module, use Psych (which ships with Ruby 1.9.2, though there is also a gem).

The reason is that YAML uses the unmaintained Syck library, whereas Psych uses the modern LibYAML:

>> require 'yaml'
>> YAML.load("%YAML 1.1\n---\n'test'")  # %YAML directive not supported
=> "%YAML 1.1 --- 'test'"

>> require 'psych'
>> Psych.load("%YAML 1.1\n---\n'test'")  # all good
=> "test"

P.S. Even if the YAML you are parsing is very simple, YAML silently runs into problems with escaped whitespace (“foo\ bar”), erroneously leaving the backslashes in the output. Psych handles this just fine.

P.P.S. YAML will use Psych instead of Syck as its engine if you have require 'psych' before require 'yaml' – thanks to Benoit Daloze for pointing this out. If this implicit behavior is causing pains for you, especially with Rails or Bundler, I recommend you read Matthew Kocher’s post about YAML, Psych, and Syck (and the discussion in the comments there).