ruby on rails - Any way to avoid using gsub! for replacement

Question

I am running in issue, where I used following code.

  def replace_variables(url, project)
    variables = define_variables(project)
    variables.each do |key, value|
      url.gsub!(key, value_encode(value))
    end
    url
  end

And issue was coming due to gsub! usage it was going up and effecting all data, where I just wanted to change data here. so I came to following solution but it is not good, any other way to do it. As it is too much variable definitions. This is working fine, but seem extra variable definitions!

  def replace_variables(url, project)
    variables = define_variables(project)
    temp_url = url
    variables.each do |key, value|
      temp_url = temp_url.gsub(key, value_encode(value))
    end
    temp_url
  end

More explaination Code creating some variables and replacing it from url and change values of it, but I have array of forms and if this runs first it changes those forms value too! which I don't want. The above code working fine but look bad as I am defining accumulator variable and iteration, is there any other way to do it elegantly. I have following define method

  def define_variables(project)
    {
        'TODAYS_DATE' => Date.current.to_s,
        'USER_NAME' => username,
        'PROJECT_NAME' => project.name || '',
     
    }
  end

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65851726/any-way-to-avoid-using-gsub-for-replacement

Answer 1

If #define_variables returns a key/value hash then something like this should work.

def replace_variables(url, project)
  define_variables(project).inject(url) do |memo, (key, value)|
    memo.gsub(key, value_encode(value))
  end
end