By: Bruce Bahlmann - Contributing Author (your feedback is important to us!)

In rails development, you may run across a case where you are given a string of characters (for example a job title, a phrase, or some other group of words) and want to simply extract the first letter of each word to form an acronym or some other cryptic word to use as a password.

Rails provides a fairly easy way to do this via chaining several functions together as shown below:

[Extract first letter of each word in a string]
s = "this is my best try"

s.split(/\s+/).map(&:first).join 
=> timbt

## Or to make these all CAPS simply add upcase

s.split(/\s+/).map(&:first).join.upcase
=> TIMBT

Note: One of the time tested best ways to select passwords is to obtain an old book of ancient proverbs or sayings and then extract the letters from these proverbs or sayings to form your password. The older the book the better. To further increase security, you can come up with your own substitution system (numbers for certain letters) and/or which letter from each word according the word's position within the phrase. The result is often a catchy yet an extremely safe password. I've used this practice in the past to generate SNMP community strings and root passwords.

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