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

"a string"[/abc(.+)abc/, 1]
# => nil
"abc123abc"[/abc(.+)abc/, 1]
# => "123"

And:

var = something.very.long.and.tedious.to.write || something.other

Please note that or has a different operator precedence than || and || should be preferred for this kind of usage. The or operator is for flow control usage, such as ARGV[0] or abort('Missing parameter').