How to conditionally format strings in Ruby?

Question

This is something that I have been trying to figure out for a while but cannot quite figure it out.

Let's say I have these four elements:

• name = "Mark"
• location = ""
• time = Time.now
• text - "foo"

And if I used str#% for formatting, like so: "%s was at the location \"%s\" around %s and said %s" % [name,location,time.to_s,text], how would I avoid the problem of blank spaces and orphaned words? (For example, "Mark was at the location "" around 2011-12-28T020500Z-0400 and said foo")

Are there any other techniques that I could use?

Answer 1

Just build the string piecemeal and assemble the results. You could easily cleanup the following if you had access to .blank? (I think it's blank?)

parts = []
parts << name if name && !name.empty?
parts << "was" if name && !name.empty? && location && !location.empty?
parts << %{at location "#{location}"} if location && !location.empty?
parts << "around #{time}"
parts << "and" if location && !location.empty? && text && !text.emtpy?
parts << "said #{text}" if text && !text.empty?
parts.join(" ")