Question

random rails/ruby questions for a nooby, much appreciated.

Confused as to what the second ‘?’ means in the line:

@page ||= params[:page].blank? ? 1 : params[:page].to_i

In init.rb files, what does FILE do really?

require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), "rails", "init")

Answer 1

The first ? is part of the method name, a convention used for methods that return a boolean result.

The second ? is the inline conditional operator:

a ? b : c

is equivalent to

if a then
  b
else
  c
end

---

__FILE__ is a kernel function that returns the filename of the current file. File.dirname(__FILE__) would just return the directory name of the current file, and File.join is the same as Array#join with the OS specific directory seperator (/ on Linux/OSX and \ on Windows)