ruby syntactic sugar: dealing with nils

Question

probably asked already but I couldn\'t find it.. here are 2 common situation (for me while programming rails..) that are frustrating to write in ruby:

\"a string         


        

Answer 1

In Ruby on Rails you have the try method available on any Object. According to the API:

Invokes the method identified by the symbol method, passing it any arguments and/or the block specified, just like the regular Ruby Object#send does.

Unlike that method however, a NoMethodError exception will not be raised and nil will be returned instead, if the receiving object is a nil object or NilClass.

So for the first question you can do this:

"a string".match(/abc(.+)abc/).try(:[], 1)

And it will either give you [1] or nil without error.