Question

How would one go about turning the following code into the latter?

<div id="faqs">
  <% if @faqs.length > 0 %>
    <% @faqs.each do |faq| %>
      <div class="faq">
        <strong>Q:</strong> <%= faq.question %>
        <br />
        <strong>A:</strong> <%= faq.answer %>
      </div>
    <% end %>
  <% else %>
    <p>No FAQs to display.</p>
  <% end %>
</div>

<div id="faqs">
  <% @faqs.empty? ? content_tag(:p, "No FAQs to display.") : @faqs.each do |faq| %>
    <div class="faq">
      <strong>Q:</strong> <%= faq.question %>
      <br />
      <strong>A:</strong> <%= faq.answer %>
    </div>
  <% end %>
</div>

I’m curious as to whether I can get the latter code to work. The only element of it that is failing at the moment is that the content_tag() is not displaying – this is due to the fact that I’m not using printable ruby tags (<%= # %>) but using them will dump out the FAQ objects underneath the content.

I considered the use of puts() to print the content_tag() while inside the ruby tags but that didn’t work.

I’ve tried to search for this issue but haven’t yielded anything useful.

Is this achievable and if so, does it have any benefits other than being prettier?

Answer 1

One way to make the later code to work if you can put the body of the loop in a helper function and return the out put of content_tag from that. The line in view file might be somewhat like this.

<%= @faqs.empty? ? content_tag(:p, "No FAQs to display.") : printList(@faqs) %>

and your printList function will return the output of nested content_tags. You can make a generic list printing function which can be used for any list.

Something so obvious but still shared.