Question

I am using Ruby on Rails 3 and I would like to use a case statement that even after matching a when statement can continue to checks other when statement until the last else.

For example

case var
when '1'
  if var2 == ...
    ...
  else
    ...
    puts "Don't make nothig but continue to check!"
    # Here I would like to continue to check if a 'when' statement will match 'var' until the 'else' case
  end
when '2'
  ...
...
else
  put "Yeee!"

end

Is it possible in Ruby? If so, how?

Answer 1

Ruby doesn’t have any sort of fall-through for case.

One alternative be a series of if statements using the === method, which is what case uses internally to compare the items.

has_matched? = false

if '2' === var
  has_matched? = true
  # stuff
end

if '3' === var
  has_matched? = true
  # other stuff
end

if something_else === var
  has_matched? = true
  # presumably some even more exciting stuff
end

if !has_matched?
  # more stuff
end

This has two glaring issues.

1. It isn’t very DRY: has_matched? = true is littered all over the place.

2. You always need to remember to place var on the right-hand-side of ===, because that’s what case does behind the scenes.

You could create your own class with a matches? method that encapsulates this functionality. It could have a constructor that takes the value you’ll be matching against (in this case, var), and it could have an else_do method that only executes its block if its internal @has_matched? instance variable is still false.

Edit:

The === method can mean anything you want it to mean. Generally, it’s a more “forgiving” way to test equivalency between two objects. Here’s an example from this this page:

class String
  def ===(other_str)
    self.strip[0, other_str.length].downcase == other_str.downcase
  end
end

class Array
  def ===(str)
    self.any? {|elem| elem.include?(str)}
  end
end

class Fixnum
  def ===(str)
    self == str.to_i
  end
end

Essentially, when Ruby encounters case var, it will call === on the objects against which you are comparing var.