Read strings Array from javascript file in Rails

Question

I have a file countries.js which contains an array of countries and I would like to read and use this in my rails app also as an array of strings.

The content of js file:

export default [
 'United States',
 'Canada',
  ...
 ];

How can I do this?

Answer 1

You can do this:

 countries = File.read('countries.js')

 countries.gsub(/export default/,"").
 split("\n").map{|c|c.gsub(/[^a-z A-Z]/,"")}.
 map(&:strip).
 reject(&:empty?)

Answer 2

My suggestion would be to convert this file to a JSON file.

contries = File.read('countries.json')
countries = JSON.parse(countries)

You might need to further parse it with JSON so that you can convert string to a collection data structure.