Question

I have an array @cities = ["Vienna", "Barcelona", "Paris"];

and I am trying to display the individual items with a spacer in between. However it is possible that there is only 1 element in the array, in which case I do not want to display the spacer. And also the array could be empty, in which case I want to display nothing.

For the above array I want the following output:

Vienna
-----
Barcelona
-----
Paris

I use an erb template cityview to apply formatting, css, etc before actually printing the city names. Simplified, it looks like this:

<p><%= @cities[@city_id] %></p>

I have implemented it as follows…

unless @array.empty?
    @city_id = 0;

    erb :cityview
end

unless @array[1..-1].nil? 
    @array[1..-1].each_index do |i|
        @city_id = i+1;

        puts "<p>-------</p>";

        erb :cityview
    end 
end

Is there a better way?

Answer 1

I’d prefer:

erb:

<p><%= @city %></p>

and loop

@array.each_with_index do |e, i|
    @city = e
    erb :cityview
    puts "<p>-------</p>" if i < @array.length - 1
end

I assume you have split the erb, bit because you want to customize it.