From: Christopher Dicely <cmdicely@...>
Date: 2009-02-11T11:02:16+09:00
Subject: Re: a better way to do this job?

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 1:11 AM, Zhenning Guan <g.zhen.ning@gmail.com> wrote:
> topics.each do |f|
>  times +=1
>  puts f.title
>  if times > 4
>    break
>
>
> a little ugly, doesn't it?


Assuming there is a times=0 before this, and what you want to do is
print each topic title if there are 5 or less topics, but only those 5
if there are more, then:

topics[0..4].each {|f| puts f.title}

or:

topics.each_with_index do |f, i|
  puts f.title
  break if i > 4
end

is probably the best way to do it (the first is, IMO, cleaner and more
understandable, the latter seems like it would somewhat more efficient
because it doesn't create an auxiliary array, though for this size it
doesn't matter, it conceivably might for very large arrays.)

5.times {|i| puts topics[i].title}

works if there are 5 or more topics, but will dump nils at the end if
there are less than 5.