Posts Tagged with "script"

Generate random text with Ruby

Published about 1 year on June 7, 2007  |  8 comments

UPDATE: Changed the generate_password method slightly based on commenter Dave Burt's suggestion.

I'm working on a project where the user can reset their password if they've forgotten it. So, I need to generate a random password and email it to them so they can login and change it. Fortunately, I found this neat little Ruby snippet that will generate random text of a given length:

def generate_password(length=6)
  chars = 'abcdefghjkmnpqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ23456789'
  password = ''
  length.times { |i| password << chars[rand(chars.length)] }
  password
end

Some examples:

generate_password
>> U48ydn

generate_password(10)
>> QzWXdAkDy5

Tagged: ruby, script

Ruby compressor for JavaScript and CSS files

Published about 1 year on December 11, 2006  |  0 comments

On Friday, Adam and I were talking about the different JavaScript libraries that are available and how bloated they are. They can easily double the page weight of your site. But, if you want to use the pre-canned goodness of Prototype or Scriptaculous, then that's the price you pay. We were trying to find ways to decrease the amount of files a user downloads when they visit our company Web site. One idea was to compress the CSS file and all of the large JavaScript files that we use. Well, I found a cool online service to compress and combine JavaScript files, but there were no readily available sources for shrinking any other kind of file that I could easily find. So, Adam told me to use sed via the command line and use the power of regular expressions to strip line breaks, tabs, and spaces out of the given file. Well, I don't know anything about regular expressions, and Adam couldn't recall the exact syntax off the top of his head. So, he retired to his corner and whipped up a nice little Ruby program to do it for us.

Enter the Shrinker!

You can download the Ruby file below. If you're on a Mac, just copy it to /usr/local/bin then CHMOD 777 it. After that, you can simply run sudo shrinker path/to/file and it will spit out a new file with the extension .shrunk that you can now name anything you want. Windows users can dump the file anywhere they want and then run, from the command line: ruby path/to/shrinker.rb path/to/file to get the same thing.

File: shrinker.rb (UPDATE: This file is no longer available, sorry.)

Tagged: ruby, javascript, script, css