From: Sam Duncan <sduncan@...>
Date: 2012-07-16T11:31:13+09:00
Subject: Re: What does this code do?

On 07/16/2012 02:19 PM, Mike Glaz wrote:
> I'm reading through a tutorial and found a solution for it (because I'm
> stuck), but I don't understand some code, so I was hoping someone could
> shed some light on it:
>
> USERNAME_REGEX = /@\w+/i
>
> class Micropost<  ActiveRecord::Base
>      def people_replied
>        users = []
>        self.content.clone.gsub!( USERNAME_REGEX ).each do |username|
>          user = User.find_by_username(username[1..-1])
>          users<<  user if user
>        end
>        users
>      end
> end
>
> This is a blog/twitter like app and I'm guessing self.content should
> contain  a string like '@mike hi how are you?'.  What would be the
> result in the users array with such a string?
>
> The class User looks like so:
>
> class User<  ActiveRecord::Base
>    attr_accessor :password
>    attr_accessible :name, :email, :password, :password_confirmation,
> :username
>
>    has_many :microposts, :dependent =>  :destroy
> end

Without knowing much about ActiveRecord, I would imagine your users 
array to contain an instance of class User for each person who had a 
record whereby their 'username' matched a '@<username>' fragment from 
your Micropost instances content. In other words; if the content 
contained '@mike', then your users array would contain a User instance 
with the username attribute of 'mike'. Does that match what you see? If 
this is a 'Rails' app you could probably get additional help from the 
Rails mailing list.

Hope that helps.

Sam