Question

As someone who came from Java background and being a newbie to Ruby,
I was wondering if there is a simple way of doing this with ruby.

new_values = foo(bar)
if new_values
  if arr
    arr << new_values
  else 
    arr = new_values
  end
end

Answer 1

Assuming “arr” is either an array or nil, I would use:

arr ||= []
arr << new_values

If you’re doing this in a loop or some such, there might be more idiomatic ways to do it. For example, if you’re iterating a list, passing each value to foo(), and constructing an array of results, you could just use:

arr = bars.map {|bar| foo(bar) }