# %w from Ruby for creating string arrays?

**URL:** <https://es.discourse.group/t/w-from-ruby-for-creating-string-arrays/407>\
**Category:** 💡 Ideas\
**Created:** [July 28, 2020, 4:25pm UTC](https://es.discourse.group/t/w-from-ruby-for-creating-string-arrays/407 "2020-07-28T16:25:33Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![NullVoxPopuli](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/free1/user_avatar/es.discourse.group/nullvoxpopuli/32/388_2.png) [@NullVoxPopuli](https://es.discourse.group/u/NullVoxPopuli)\
**Post date:** [July 28, 2020, 4:25pm UTC](https://es.discourse.group/t/w-from-ruby-for-creating-string-arrays/407/1 "2020-07-28T16:25:33Z")

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Hello!, I'm new to the TC39 Discourse \<3

When working with long lists of strings, it may be beneficial to not have to wrap in quotes and type a comma at the end of each string -- especially if you know the strings are "one word".

Ruby has this syntax (or method?) [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/690794/ruby-arrays-w-vs-w](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/690794/ruby-arrays-w-vs-w)

where you'd wrap all your words in a single string, and it converts to an array of strings for you.

So, idk if TC39 is the right place to talk about this, or if this is more "standard-lib" territory (would TC39 be the right place for new JS APIs?)

but, I found myself with this on a PR recently to achieve the same behavior

```javascript
const arrayOfStrings = `
  foo
  bar
  baz
  bax
  etc
`
  .split(/\s/) // split on whitespace
  .filter(Boolean); // filter out empty strings

```

I think tagged template literals could achieve the same thing via:

```javascript
function w(strings) {
  return strings.join().split(/\s/).filter(Boolean);
}

const arrayOfStrings = w`
  foo
  bar
  baz
  bax
  etc
`;

// => Array(5) ["foo", "bar", "baz", "bax", "etc"]

```

idk. what are people's thoughts on this?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![bergus](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/free1/user_avatar/es.discourse.group/bergus/32/152_2.png) [@bergus](https://es.discourse.group/u/bergus)\
**Post date:** [July 28, 2020, 6:19pm UTC](https://es.discourse.group/t/w-from-ruby-for-creating-string-arrays/407/2 "2020-07-28T18:19:57Z")

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Hello and welcome!

> [@NullVoxPopuli](#):
>
> tagged template literals could achieve the same thing

> [@NullVoxPopuli](#):
>
> Idk if TC39 is the right place to talk about this, or if this is more "standard-lib" territory

Yes, this is a perfect use case for tagged template literals, things like this were the motivation to introduce them. One can and should solve this with a userland library at first, then once it's battle-tested and highly popular in the community it could get adopted into the builtin standard library.