rails: How do I convert a symbol to a class

Question

Given a symbol in rails, how do I get a Class? So I could call something like:

give_class(:post).find(:all)

or similar.

Answer 1

First, convert to string.

class_name = symbol.to_s

From there, you will need to format the string into a proper class name using the methods provided by ActiveSupport's Inflector.

• camelize will turn 'my_module' into 'MyModule'
• classify will turn 'my_models' into 'MyModel'

camelize is more likely the one you want, given your code snippet.

Then use the constantize method:

klass = class_name.constantize

Classy!