Ruby has a neat method available for enumerating all constants defined within a namespace/class/module – constants(). As all classes inherit from the Object class, one can call Object.constants() to get a list of constants which can then be filtered into something useful.
For example, I had defined a bunch of *Parser classes in my code. Rather than manually instantiate each one, I used the following to iterate over them automagically.
Object.constants().each do |const|
if !is_my_class?(const)
next
end
obj = Module.const_get(const).new()
# do stuff here
obj = nil
end
Simply define is_my_class?() and you’re good to go.
