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 don't mind that the "last" action happens before the stuff in the middle, then this monkey-patch:

class Array

  def for_first
    return self if empty?
    yield(first)
    self[1..-1]
  end

  def for_last
    return self if empty?
    yield(last)
    self[0...-1]
  end

end

Allows this:

%w(a b c d).for_first do |e|
  p ['first', e]
end.for_last do |e|
  p ['last', e]
end.each do |e|
  p ['middle', e]
end

# => ["first", "a"]
# => ["last", "d"]
# => ["middle", "b"]
# => ["middle", "c"]