In Ruby you can use the &. operator to return nil when chaining stuff on something that could or could not be nil. Like this:
Let's say we have the variable dog
dog might have an associated owner - if an owner exists, the owner do have a name. We would reach the owner name by doing this:
dog.owner.name
BUT, this might be a stray dog with no owner (yes, sad )
dog.owner == nil
when we then try to use name on nil we will get a
NoMethodError: undefined method "name" for nil:NilClass
.. let's say that in this case the desired behavior would instead be to return nil.
That is easily done in ruby by using &. - like this:
dog.owner&.name - that will make a check "Is there a owner object here? No, ok, let's finish and return nil!"
This is VERY useful I would say. Maybe someone disagrees, that's fine but please refrain from starting that potential debate which would make this thread stray from my actuall question. Which is this:
Is there a equivalent operator like this for javascript?
