Magic First and Last Indicator in a Loop in Ruby/Rails?

Question

Ruby/Rails does lots of cool stuff when it comes to sugar for basic things, and I think there\'s a very common scenario that I was wondering if anyone has done a helper or s

Answer 1

If you are willing to add some boilerplate, you can add something like this to the array class:

class Array
  def each_fl
    each_with_index do |x,i|
      yield [i==0 ? :first : (i==length-1 ? :last : :inner), x]
    end
  end
end

and then anywhere you need to, you get the following syntax:

[1,2,3,4].each_fl do |t,x|
  case t
    when :first
      puts "first: #{x}"
    when :last
      puts "last: #{x}"
    else
      puts "otherwise: #{x}"
  end
end

for the following output:

first: 1
otherwise: 2
otherwise: 3
last: 4