Question

Is there a simple way in Ruby to get a true/false value from something without explicitly evaluating it to true or false

e.g. how would one more succinctly express

class User
  def completed_initialization?
    initialization_completed == 1 ? true : false
  end
end

is there some way to do something along the lines of

initialization_completed.true?

There’s obviously not much in it but since I’m in the zen garden of Ruby I might as well embrace it

EDIT (I’ve updated the example)

This question was extremely badly phrased as was very gently pointed out by @Sergio Tulentsev. The original example (below) does of course evaluate directly to a boolean. I’m still struggling to find an example of what I mean however Sergio’s double-negative was in fact exactly what I was looking for.

Original example

class User
  def top_responder
    responses.count > 10 ? true : false
  end
end

Answer 1

> operator already returns boolean value. So it can be just

  def top_responder
    responses.count > 10
  end

To convert arbitrary values to booleans, I offer you this little double-negation trick.

t = 'foo'
!!t # => true

t = 1
!!t # => true

t = 0
!!t # => true

t = nil
!!t # => false

The first negation “casts” value to boolean and inverts it. That is, it will return true for nil / false and false for everything else. We need another negation to make it produce “normal” values.