Instantiate a Class from a String in Rails

Sometimes you want your class names to be dynamic. Rails has a nice constantize inflector that makes this easy.

In the simplest of examples, let's just say you have a "post" string and you want to load the Post class from it. Something like the following should work great.

str = "post"
new_class_instance = str.constantize.new

We can get a little wild. Let's say you have a multi-word string and want to constantize and then instantiate it.

str = "posts controller"
new_class_instance = str.titleize.gsub(/\ /, '').constantize.new

Essentially, this just shows you want a properly-cased string (the string equivalent of the class name) before you call constantize.