How do I create English-language list (name1, name2, AND name3) in Ruby on Rails?

Question

Quite possibly there could be a rails magic I've missed, but I'm guessing it will be in Ruby.

I have a model called Company which has_many Contacts.

Suppose Company has Contact 1, Contact 2, Contact 3, and Contact 4.

When I create a textblog for each Contact, I want to output the following (where Contact = Contact 1)

"Hi, Contact 1, I am also writing to Contact 2, Contact 3, and Contact 4."

So it needs to extract the Contact in the salutation and then list them, inserting "and" before the last Contact in the list.

Edit

I now have the following:

This is in contacts_controller.rb

  def full_name
   [self.first_name, self.last_name].compact.join(" ")
  end

in contact_letters_controllers.rb (contact_letters are the executed contacts with letters)

  def new

    @contact_letter = ContactLetter.new
    @contact_letter.contact_id = params[:contact]
    @contact_letter.letter_id = params[:letter]

    @contact = Contact.find(params[:contact])
    @company = Company.find(@contact.company_id)

    contacts = @company.contacts.collect(&:full_name)

    contacts.each do |contact|
       @colleagues = contacts.reject{ |c| [email protected]_name }
    end

    @letter = Letter.find(@contact_letter.letter_id)

    @letter.body.gsub!("{FirstName}", @contact.first_name)
    @letter.body.gsub!("{Company}", @contact.company_name) 
    @letter.body.gsub!("{Colleagues}", @colleagues.to_sentence)

    @contact_letter.body = @letter.body
    @contact_letter.status = "sent"

  end 

Answer 1

I believe to_sentence is what you're looking for.

You could try something like the following:

contacts = Company.contacts.collect(&:name)

contacts.each do |contact|
   other_contacts = contacts.reject{ |c| c==contact }
   p "Hi, #{contact}, I am also writing to #{other_contacts.to_sentence}"
end

I didn't test this code, so forgive me if this doesn't work.

Edit

This method will return the contact's full_name. If you also have a middle_name attribute, you can add on the array. This method will still work if any of the attributes is nil.

def full_name
   [self.first_name, self.last_name].compact.join(" ")
end