The other day I was working on a feature that takes some form content, conditionally sets parameters and sends that data to a third party so another team can access it.
I ran into a slight issue that was sort of surprising to me. I have an array of field values that I can’t control the formatting before I get it. It’s kind of silly, but it is what it is.
The data comes from a series of checkboxes, and looks something like this.
[“The Lemon Song”, “Whole Lotta Love”, “Dazed and Confused”]
This would be what I would get if the user selected The Lemon Song, Whole Lotta Love, and Dazed and Confused.
The logical part here is that I need to set a value if an option is checked.
A few ways to do this, but I decided some sort of partial match is best.
This is where I say that I am strongly against matching any data by string. It’s super fragile. But sometimes you just have to work within your constraints.
Being that Ruby is awesome and makes a programmer’s job easier. I always just try what I want to work. Using include? on the Array would have been perfect.
["The Lemon Song", "Whole Lotta Love", "Dazed and Confused”].include? “Whole Lotta”
=> false
Turns out that include? could work. But needs to match the entire string exactly.
["The Lemon Song", "Whole Lotta Love", "Dazed and Confused”].include? “Whole Lotta Love”
=> true
The problem with this, again a constraint that I can’t change, is that some of these strings are very long. The shorter my matching substring is, the lesser chance I have of breaking something because someone decided to move the words around.
Turns out Enumerable has a method any? that takes a block. The side effect here is that it walks through the entire collection. One last trade off I am reluctant to accept, but decide it’s worth it given the requirements.
The code now looks like this:
["The Lemon Song", "Whole Lotta Love", "Dazed and Confused"].any? {|item| item.include? "Whole Lotta”}
=> true
Okay, I lied. One more small trade off. Enumerable#include? is case sensitive because it matches using ==.
["The Lemon Song", "Whole Lotta Love", "Dazed and Confused"].any? {|item| item.include? "whole lotta”}
=> false
But at least now I can walk through the Array and set parameters conditionally.
While writing this, I learned that I can use String#casecmp to match strings with case insensitivity. The return value is a little weird. 0 for a match. It looks like if you are using Ruby 2.5, you can use String#casecmp? and get a boolean back.