Can I use curly brackets in Ruby If Else?

Question

I'm learning Ruby but came across a very annoying thing: I can't use curly brackets in If else constructs! I left Python as I didn't feel comfortable with indenting the statements carefully.

Is this the same way in Ruby also? For example: Can I write something like this:

if token == "hello" {
  puts "hello encountered"
  # lots of lines here
}

Is there any way of using curly brackets to do this. I read about blocks also but not sure how can they be used in If Else stuff

Answer 1

Nope. You need to use end instead of a }.

Answer 2

You can't use curly braces, but indentation doesn't matter either. Instead of a closing brace, Ruby uses the end keyword.

if token == "hello"
  puts "hello encountered"
  # lots of lines here
end

I'd still recommend indenting carefully, though — poorly indented code will trick human readers even if braces are used correctly.

Answer 3

This is cute:

def my_if(condition, &block)
    block.call if condition
end

Use as follows:

my_if(token == "hello") { 
    puts "hello encountered!" 
}