Question

Let’s say I want to do this pseudo code:

if plan = some_api.get_plan
  return plan
else
  return 'free'
end

How can I most elegantly do this in Rails? I want to minimise calls to some_api.get_plan.

Answer 1

In this case the simplest code is:

return some_api.get_plan || 'free'

But since assignments return the assigned value, you can do assignment and a conditional at the same time (and in fact, I do it all the time to make my code more concise).