An interesting thread at Ruby_talk is ‘Your favorite bit of Ruby code.’

John Carter from New Zealand has this interesting snippet of code:

# Ruby is Objects all the way down and open for extension...
class Integer
  def factorial
    return 1 if self <= 1
    self * (self-1).factorial
  end
end

puts 6.factorial

In one of my projects, I need to find the file-size in megabytes again and again. This simple method helps me to convert the size of a file in bytes to megabytes. This is useful for very large files.

MEGABYTE = 1024.0 * 1024.0
def bytesToMeg bytes
  bytes /  MEGABYTE
end

# big file
len = File.size("Dreamweaver8-en.exe")
puts len.to_s + ' bytes'  # displays 62651176 bytes
puts bytesToMeg(len).to_s + ' MB'  # displays 59.7488174438477 MB

The program code is pretty obvious and as you can see the method uses division. However, it is best to wrap this functionality in a method.