Inspired by groovys questionmark-syntax. ‘I dont give a shit’ tries to implement this behavior in ruby.
You can put a ? behind every method-call to ignore, weather it returns nil.
So chaining of calls within deep data-structures is painless:
some_data_that_might_contain_nil.order?.shoppingcart?.item?.second?.price?
This call would return the price of the second item in the shopping-cart or nil if some of the objects in the data-structure is nil itself.
$ gem install phoet-idgas -s http://gems.github.com
Just require the gem and put it in a place where it can override the default behavior of your script. You might put it as an initializer in your rails application or something like that.
$ irb -rubygems require ‘i_dont_give_a_shit’ nil.i?.dont?.give?.a?.shit? => nil