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

For the first question, I think Bob's answer is good.

For the second question,

var = something.very.long.and.tedious.to.write.instance_eval{nil? ? something.other : self}