Ruby 'Capitalize!' paradox

Question

In Ruby we have the 'bang' method capitalize! which has the strange behavior of returning a nil if no changes to the string were made.

That means I can't chain this commands with other since it effectively destroys the chain if it returns nil.

What im trying to do is something like this:

fname =  fullname[0...fullname.index(' ')].capitalize!

which extracts the first name from a string and should capitalize it as well. But if it is already capitalized the string stored in fname is nil.

Of courses I can add another statement but was wondering if there is a way to do this "without breaking the chain".

Answer 1

Use .capitalize (without the bang) -- unless you actually need it to change the source.

Answer 2

Since your statement doesn't change the value of fullname, just do:

fname =  fullname[0...fullname.index(' ')].capitalize

Which doesn't return nil if no change is made.