Question

I have a string called word and a function called infinitive such that
word.infinitive would return another string on some occasions and an empty string otherwise
I am trying to find an elegant ruby one line expression for the code-snippet below

if word.infinitive == ''       return word else return word.infinitive 

Had infinitive returned nil instead of ”, I could have done something like

(word.infinitive or word) 

But since it does not, I can’t take advantage of the short-circuit OR
Ideally I would want
1) a single expression that I could easily embed in other code
2) the function infinitive being called only once
3) to not add any custom gems or plugins into my code

Answer 1

If you’re not ashamed of monkeypatching and abusing syntax, this would work:

class String   def | x     if empty? then x else self end   end end 

Then you can say word.infinitive | word, which actually scans fairly naturally, if you ask me.

However, I think a better idea would be to modify the infinitive method, or add a version of it that returns the word unchanged.

Edit: Here’s a possibly more elegant solution:

[word.infinitive, word].find {|x| not x.empty?}