Question

i have a variable like /projects/3/blah blah or /projects/3 or just /projects

What I’d like to do is have an IF statement in Rails like this:

IF urlPath contains /projects proceed

Does Rails / Ruby have a method for that? Also, likely it shouldn’t have a false positive for something like /books/projects or /authors/mr-projects/ etc…

jquery posting to Rails which them does the above evaluation:

$.ajax({
    url: '/navigations/sidenav',
    //data:{"urlpath":urlpath}, // 
    data: "urlpath=" + urlpath,
    success: function(e){
        $("#sideNav-container").slideDown("slow");
    }
});

Answer 1

In rails you can use starts_with? to do such things:

if params[:urlpath].starts_with? "/projects"
  #...
end

Of course this fails when the hash lookup evaluates to nil. This is where the try method comes in handy:

if params[:urlpath].try(:starts_with?, "/projects")
  #...
end