Printing the alphabet easily in Ruby on Rails

Posted on 04 May 2006

It's really easy to print out the alphabet with Ruby. I needed to do recently as an additional method for searching by letter. Although, I could see it might be useful for pagination.

The code I used is as follows:

<ul>
  <% "A".upto("Z") do |l| -%>	    
     <li><%= link_to l, genre_letter_url(:letter => l) %></li>	
  <% end %>
</ul>

The key bit is "A".upto("Z") do |l|. Note that if you use lowercase letters then your output will be in lowercase.

If you are wondering about my use of genre_letter_url(:letter => l) This is best explained in my article about routes in ruby on rails and in particular named routes.

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