Question

How to capture greps return value in an if statement for use inside block ?

colors = ["red", "blue", "white"]

if color = colors.grep(/^b/)                # Would be nice to capture the color blue
  puts "Found #{color.first}."              # with the regex, and pass it down to block
else
  puts "Did not find the first color."
end

How could we express this differently?

Answer 1

You could do something like this:

if (found = colors.grep(/^b/)).empty?
  puts "Did not find the first color."
else
  puts "Found #{found.first}."
end

to capture the array and check if it is empty in one go. If you only want found.first then I’d go with Jakub’s.