til/rails/convert-a-symbol-to-a-constant.md

Convert A Symbol To A Constant

If you have a symbol and need to convert it to a constant, perhaps because of some metaprogramming induced by a polymorphic solution, then you may start off on an approach like the following. In fact, I've seen a number of StackOverflow solutions like this.

:module.to_s.capitalize.constantize
#=> Module

That is great for one-word constant names, but what about multi-word constants like OpenStruct. This approach will not work for the symbol :open_struct. We need a more general solution.

The key is to ditch #capitalize and instead use another ActiveSupport method, #classify`.

:open_struct.to_s.classify.constantize
#=> OpenStruct