In this section, we are going to learn more about a powerful method in Ruby called grep. This method is used to easily search through arrays and other collections.
We are going to learn the use of this method in a real-world Rails application.
If I go to the root of the application in the Terminal, I can run the rake routes command to get a list of all the routes in the application.
This will display all the different routes in the application, as follows:
This is helpful but also a bit overwhelming. What if I wanted only the routes specific to posts? So to filter this list, I can use the grep method. Just run the following command in the Terminal:
rake routes | grep posts
The output will be much more manageable:
When you use this command, it only brings up all the routes that have the word posts in them.
So what does grep do exactly?
Let's see...