@strips = @user.comics.collect {|c|
c.strips.find(:all, :conditions => [“date > ?“, 7.days.ago])}.
flatten.
delete_if {|c| c == nil}.
sort_by {|c| c.date}
The previous shows ruby in much of it’s glory, and is code that I needed this weekend for one of my side hacking projects. I’ve colored it to match what xemacs shows me, just to make it a little more clear.
First off, it shows off the power of mixins. 7.days.ago does exactly what you would expect, providing you with a date object.
Second, it shows off the power of collect (aka map in many other languages). Collect lets you iterate through a list you have, and return a new collection based on an arbitrary transform. In this case returning a list of strip objects for each comic.
And lastly, it shows the fact that collection operations can be chained. My list of lists becomes a single order list, I purge out nils (probably redundant at this point), and then sort all the objects by their date field.
Ruby is such a fun language to program in. 🙂
It's always more complicated 