Aimred Developer Blog November 2007 Archive

1st Cape_Town.rb Meeting Presentations Online

The inaugural meeting of the Cape Town Ruby Brigade was a great success with a turnout higher than expected, a good sign for the Ruby community in Cape Town (and South Africa). All four presentations given at the meeting are now available online.

Rescue On One Line

Here’s a handy tip we learnt from a colleague at CLUG (although it is talked about in Chapter 22 of the Pickaxe Book, 2nd edition – we just missed it). If you’ve got a simple rescue clause then you can just use the rescue keyword as a modifier on your statement like so:

Integer("test") rescue puts("Exception!")

There are a couple things to keep in mind:

  • You do not get an exception parameter as you would on a full fledged rescue block
  • You can only rescue StandardError exceptions and it’s descendants.

However you can do some nifty stuff. For instance, given an array of string representations of both integers and floats you can convert the array into numbers of the correct class like so:

["1","1.5","2"].map{|i| Integer(i) rescue Float(i)}

which will give you a result of

[1, 1.5, 2]

Cape Town Ruby Brigade Launches

The Cape Town Ruby Brigade will be officially launching on the 14th of November. All the pertinent details are at the cape_town.rb home page.

About Aimred

Aimred is a specialist Ruby and Ruby on Rails development house and consultancy based in Cape Town, South Africa.

We provide Ruby and Ruby on Rails development, consulting and training services to businesses and organisations of all sizes. If you want to find out how we can help you, contact us at info@aimred.com.