Question

what the syntax is in Action Mailer Basics rails guide ?

class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
   def welcome_email(user)
      recipients    user.email
      from          "My Awesome Site Notifications <[e-mail]>"
      subject       "Welcome to My Awesome Site"
      sent_on       Time.now
      body          {:user => user, :url => "http://example.com/login"}
   end
end

How should i understand the construction, like

from "Some text for this field"

Is it an assignment the value to a variable, called “from” ?

Answer 1

No, it’s a method call. The name of the method is from, and the argument is a string. In Ruby, parentheses around method calls are optional, so

from "Some text for this field"

is the same as

from("Some text for this field")

Rails (and many Ruby libraries) like to express code in a natural language style, though, so the parentheses-less version reads better, hence why it is used in examples.