Question

The question is in regard to the Rails tutorial. In particular I have a doubt about listing 6.23, this line:

before_save { |user| user.email = email.downcase }

I am curious about the variable “email” – where does it come from? Is it some kind of short Ruby syntax to call the left-hand side variable? Or does it call to the model’s attribute (it would make passing the block variable redundant though)?

I’d appreciate anyone ridding me of my confusion.

Answer 1

Yes, you can omit passing the user to the block

before_save { self.email = email.downcase }

I personally prefer not using blocks and write named methods for this

before_save :reformat_email


private
def reformat_email
  self.email = email.downcase
end