More Trivial Scripting with Ruby

Last Friday, in Trivial Scripting with Ruby on O'Reilly Ruby, Gregory Brown demonstrated a two-line example of the ease with which simple utility scripts can be created from Ruby. In his case a script that takes a filepath and returns the contents with all HTML entities escaped.

I like it, but I don't have any use for this operating on a per-file basis. More useful to me is being able to pass in the HTML text via command line args:

I saved this as esc.rb. To use:

Sagarmatha:~/Documents/utilityscripts chris$ ./esc.rb "<em>Hello & World</em>"
&lt;em&gt;Hello &amp; World&lt;/em&gt;