Ruby 'net/http': What's the meaning of the slash (/)?

When I require 'net/http, what's the meaning of the slash?

Does it mean require the module 'http' within the 'net'-module?

How has the statement to be read?

Answer

In Ruby, when you write:

require 'net/http'

the slash (/) in 'net/http' is simply part of the file path, not special Ruby syntax. It tells Ruby to load the file http.rb from the net directory within the Ruby standard library.

So yes — conceptually, you're requiring the 'http' module within the 'net' module or library. The net folder contains various networking-related modules like http, ftp, imap, etc.

You can read the statement as:

Require the http library that's part of the net collection of networking libraries.

It doesn’t mean nested Ruby modules per se (though the code might define them that way), but rather refers to the file structure in the standard library.