Question

I’m thinking there has got to be a cleaner way to check if a regular expression is not nil / is true. This is what I have been using:
hold = (h4.text =~ /Blah/)
if !hold.nil?
…
end

I tried: !(h4.text =~ /Blah/).nil? but it did not seem to work.

Answer 1

#!/usr/bin/ruby1.8

text = 'Blah blah blah'
puts "blah" if text =~ /Blah/    # => blah

text = 'Foo bar baz'
puts "blah" if text =~ /Blah/    # (nothing printed)

• In a Ruby conditional statement,
  anything that is neither nil nor
  false is considered to be true.

• =~ returns nil for no match, or an integer character position if there
  is a match.

• nil is as good a false; an integer is
  as good as true.

Therefore, you can use the result of =~ directly in an if, while, etc.