Question

I’m working on some Watir-webdriver tests in Ruby and can’t seem to get the following code to work. I want to pass an optional validation argument into the log_activity method.

def log_activity (type, *validation)
    #do something
end

I pass the following arguments into the method:

log_activity("license", 1)

I expect validation == 1 to be true, but it is false:

puts validation.empty?
-> false

puts validation
-> 1

if validation == 1
    puts "validation!!!!"
else
    puts "WTF"
end
-> WTF

What am I doing wrong?

Forgot to mention, I’m using ruby 1.9.3

Answer 1

*validation is an array that includes the second and all arguments afterwards. Given that it is an array, the results you see make sense. You want to check the first element in the *validation array.

Alternatively, if you will only get one optional argument, you can do:

def log_activity (type, validation=nil)
    #do something
end

Then validation will be whatever you passed in.