Using Conditional Assignments
Written by steve on 07-18-2007 at 01:52 AM
Often the programming pattern “set this to such-and-such unless it already has a value” pops up. It’s what default parameters were invented for, but the problem is not limited to function calls. Ruby has a nifty idiom to handle this.
Here’s the expanded version
if options[:title].nil?
options[:title] = options[:alt]
end
We could make this a bit more terse by compressing it thusly:
options[:title] = options[:alt] if options[:title].nil?
Looking better, but there’s a more idiomatic way to express this:
options[:title] ||= options[:alt]
The ||= operator is called the “conditional assignment” operator. In fact, what’s happening in the expression lhs ||= rhs is this:
lhs = lhs || rhs
So lhs is evaluated to find out whether it produces a true value. Remember, nil evaluates to false in a boolean test. If it does evaluate to true the boolean OR short-circuit kicks in and the assignment is made (i.e., the variable lhs remains unchanged). However, if lhs is nil, it evaluates to false, forcing the evaluation of rhs and assignment of that evaluation to lhs.
Mind you, we haven’t saved any machine cycles, but the next time you see
@title ||= 'myfinesite.com'
You’ll know what it does!
0 comments