Question

I’m looking for some help on how to take an attribute and process it through a method to return something different. But I’ve never done this before and I’ not sure where to start. I thought trying to change a name:string attribute from “George Washington” or “John Quincy Adams” into first names only “George” and “John”.

I thought maybe a helper method would be best, such as

users_helper.rb

def first_name

end

and then call @user.name.first_name, would this be initially how it would work? Can someone explain where I’d go next to be able to pass @user.name into the method? I’ve seen things like this but don’t quite understand it the parenthesis…

def first_name(name)
  puts name
end

Could someone breakdown how rails/ruby does this type of thing? Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

The parentheses (which are optional) enclose the parameter list.

def first_name(full_name)
  full_name.split(" ")[0]
end

This assumes the parameter is not nil.

> puts first_name "Jimmy McKickems"
Jimmy
> puts first_name "Jeezy"
Jeezy

But this is not a string method, as your assumption is now:

@user.full_name.first_name # Bzzt.

Instead:

first_name @user.name

This could be wrapped up in the model class itself:

class User < ActiveRecord
  # Extra stuff elided

  def first_name
    self.full_name.blank? ? "" : self.full_name.split(" ")[0]
  end
end

The extra code checks to see if the name is nil or whitespace (blank? comes from Rails). If it is, it returns an empty string. If it isn’t, it splits it on spaces and returns the first item in the resulting array.