Question

Previously on #ruby somebody told me that I do not need to use @name and self.name unless the variable name is already defined locally, which I was happy to learn would make my code a bit neater I thought. After playing around and adjusting a few of my classes I noticed that I could not access name (it is nil) after setting @name in initialize in the subclass.

The following works:

module EnvyGeeks
  class Attributes

    attr_accessor :persons_name

    def initialize(name)
      @persons_name = name
    end

  end
end

module EnvyGeeks
  class MyAttributes < Attributes

    def initialize(name)
      @persons_name = name
      puts persons_name
    end

  end
end

envygeeks = EnvyGeeks::MyAttributes.new("Jordon")

The following fails:

require "pp"

module Jekyll
  class MyPages < Page

    def initialize(site, base, page)
      @name = page.split("/")
      pp name # => nil
    end

  end
end

That class taps off this super class:
https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/blob/master/lib/jekyll/page.rb

I’m a bit confused why name would not be working in this instance but in the first it does?

More information:

From: ./pages.rb @ line 19 in Jekyll::MyPages#initialize:

    14:     def initialize(site, base, page)
    15:       @site = site
    16:       @dir  = "/"
    17:       @base = base
    18:       
 => 19:       binding.pry
    20:       @name = page.split("/")
    21:       if name.length > 1
    22:         name.pop if name.last =~ /index.html$/
    23:         name = name.join("/") if name.length > 1


pry(#<Jekyll:Page @name=nil>)> @name = page.split("/") => ["index.html"]
pry(#<Jekyll:Page @name=["index.html"]>)> name => nil

Answer 1

Which version of Ruby is this? On 1.9.2 it works fine.

require 'jekyll'
require 'pp'

module Jekyll

  class TestPage < Page
    def initialize(site,base,page)
      @name = "test"
      puts name # => test
      pp name # => "test"
    end
  end

end

a = Jekyll::TestPage.new("","","")