Ruby Quicktips

Give it a try!

As of Rails 2.3, there is a handy new try method on objects, which allows you to invoke a method on a possibly nil object without throwing a NoMethodError. This saves you the trouble of checking if your object is nil before accessing a method.

For example, previously you’d need to do something like this:

article = Article.find_by_title("My Article")
unless article.nil? 
  article.body
end

With try you can skip the nil? check and do the following:

Article.find_by_title("My Article").try(:body) => #body or nil

Check out the documentation on try.

This post was ‘manually’ reblogged from michaelbulat.