Inflector is an integral part of ActiveSupport, which provides conversions of programming symbols from one representation to the other, as well as pluralizations for common English words.
Inflector is a module that has a number of methods, that you can use for your own needs (provided your application is purely English-speaking):
>> Inflector::camelize(:foo_bar)
=> "FooBar"
>> Inflector::underscore(:JustAnotherClass)
=> "just_another_class"
The camelize method has a perk – when you feed it forward slashes they will be converted to the Ruby module delimiter:
>> Inflector::camelize('foo/bar/class')
=> "Foo::Bar::Class" This feature is used by Rails to automatically load all of the code which is placed into directories according to this pattern. It means that
Foo::Bar::Class # will force 'foo/bar/class.rb' to be loaded
Pluralization is provided by pluralize and singularize
>> Inflector::pluralize("Building")
=> "Buildings" It is essential that you understand and peruse Inflector to harness the magic within rails.