Human Value

HumanValue translates values into human-friendly formats.

For example, humans like to read "1,000,000" rather than "1000000", or "12/12/2012 at 4:30 PM MT" rather than "2012-12-12 16:30:00 -0700".

In Rails, use the h abbreviated helper method.

<span><%= h 1000 %></span>

to produce

<span>1,000</span>

Add this line to your application's Gemfile and run bundle install:

gem 'human_value'

Out of the box, HumanValue knows how to humanize the following types:

• Booleans
• Numerics
• Dates and times
• Enumerables
• Classes with a model_name (i.e. ActiveModel and ActiveRecord classes)

HumanValue also comes with extensions for humanizing values from common Rails libraries. Extensions are enabled as follows in a config/initializers/human_value.rb file.

HumanValue.enable_extension(:carrierwave)

• :carrierwave

  • renders image attachments as <img> tags
  • renders file attachments as <a> tags

• :naming

  • tries to render names by calling a name method

You may add your own humanizations using the HumanValue.humanization hook. You must define a test block (i.e. does this humanization apply) and a coerce block which performs the humanization.

For example, let's assume we have a User class with a name method which should fall back to the email method. We can add a custom humanization in config/initializers/human_value.rb.

HumanValue.humanization :user do
  test   { |value| value.is_a?(User) }
  coerce { |value| value.name || value.email }
end

<% user_1 = User.new(name: "Timothy Tyler", email: "tim@gmail.com") %>
<% user_2 = User.new(name: nil, email: "anon@gmail.com") %>

<%= h user_1 %>
<%= h user_2 %>

which produces

Timothy Tyler
anon@gmail.com

If you need to add a custom humanization which supercedes one of the default humanizations, use the :prepend option.

For example, perhaps you want to humanize booleans to "Yep" and "Nope" rather than "Yes" and "No".

HumanValue.humanization :boolean, prepend: true do
  test   { |value| [true, false].include?(value) }
  coerce { |value| value ? "Yep" : "Nope" }
end

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

Foraker Labs builds exciting web and mobile apps in Boulder, CO. Our work powers a wide variety of businesses with many different needs. We love open source software, and we're proud to contribute where we can. Interested to learn more? Contact us today.

This project is maintained by Foraker Labs. The names and logos of Foraker Labs are fully owned and copyright Foraker Design, LLC.