How to get human readable class name in Ruby on Rails?

Question

I am building an application with Ruby 1.9.3 and Rails 3.0.9

I have a class like below.

module CDA
  class Document
    def humanize_class_name
      self.class.name.gsub("::","")
    end
  end
end

I want the class name like "CDADocument".

Is my humanize_class_name method is the correct way to achieve this?

OR

Any other built in methods available with Rails?

Answer 1

I think Rails might have something similar, but since the form you want is peculiar, you will have to design the method by yourself. The position where you define it is wrong. You would have to do that for each class. Instead, you should define it in Class class.

class Class
    def humanize_class_name
      name.delete(":")
    end
end
some_instance.class.humanize_class_name #=> the string you want

or

class Object
    def humanize_class_name
        self.class.name.delete(":")
    end
end
some_instance.humanize_class_name #=> the string you want

Answer 2

If you using i18n you can call Model.model_name.human to get the localized model name.

E.g.: Event.model_name.human returns my localized name.

Docs: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveModel/Name.html#method-i-human