Question

In my Rails 3 web app, I have a Twitter text field in one of the forms and on the user page it displays it.

<%= f.label :twitter, "Twitter Username" %>
<%= f.text_field :twitter, :value => "@" %>

And on the user page:

<% if @user.twitter?  %>
  <div class="twitter"><%= @user.twitter %></div>
<% end %>

The problem is, when a user doesn’t enter their Twitter username into the field, it keeps @ in the field and displays it on the user page. Because of this I would like to make it so if it just has @ then it doesn’t display it.

Answer 1

Looks like the @ value gets persisted into the database if the user doesn’t specify a twitter name, right? Are you sure you want that?

You could, in the controller, when saving the user, do something like:

user.twitter = params[:user][:twitter] unless params[:user][:twitter] == "@"

This will ensure that the User#twitter field only gets set if something is specified.

But to answer your question specifically, you can do something like this in the view:

<%= @user.twitter == "@" ? "(not provided)" : @user.twitter %>