From: Tom Sawyer <transami@...>
Date: 2002-07-03T09:51:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Getting CGI arguments as scalars

you can also modify the CGI class to return a scalar if the parameters
array only contains a sinlge element:

require 'cgi'

class CGI
  module QueryExtension
    def [](*args)
      if @params[*args]
        case @params[*args].length
        when 0
          return nil
        when 1
          return @params[*args][0]
        else
          return @params[*args]
        end
      else
        return nil
      end
    end
  end
end

as to the relative merits of this, which is better? i don't know. but
this works well for me. the only trick is to remember to access the
paramaters (i.e.cgi.params) directly if you want to manipulate the
parameters array, as [] will no longer be certain to return such a
reference.

~transami


On Mon, 2002-07-01 at 14:29, Philip Mak wrote:
> cgi = CGI.new
> year = cgi['year'] => ['2002']
> 
> In the CGI module, all the arguments are given as arrays instead of
> scalars (presumably to support the case where the HTML page had
> multiple <INPUT> tags of the same name).
> 
> How can I get it as a scalar, though? Right now I'm using:
> 
> year ,= cgi['year']
> 
> Is this a safe syntax to use (i.e. will it be valid in future versions
> of Ruby)? It seems to be an abuse of the comma notation (I would think
> that the comma is meant to *separate* lvalues).
>