before_save, strip a string

Question

I'm trying to strip the whitespaces of the variable Username in my User Model.

I'm using

before_save do
  self.username.strip!
end

but it doesn't seem to work, am i missing something ?

Goodsell

You're missing the assignment self.username = self.username.strip! – Boiney

@Hitham S. AlQadheeb, There is no need for the assignment. using strip! already do that. – Digester

Answer 1

You'd rather update the setter instead of polluting your model with callbacks:

def username=(value)
  self[:username] = value.to_s.strip
end

Btw, I prefer squish

Contumacious

Thanks for answering, it worked just fine. Can you explain to me why you prefer squish over strip? – Goodsell

squish removes all silly blanks, strip only removes leading and trailing – Contumacious

Sounds cool, so i replace value.to_s.strip => value.to_s.squish right ? – Goodsell

@daniel this was to avoid the nil possibility – Contumacious

please use super(value.to_s.strip) instead of self[:attr] = value.to_s.strip if it's ActiveRecord – Arcboutant

Answer 2

If you want to remove only leading and trailing white space you can use .strip!

But as you said:

I'm trying to strip the whitespaces of the variable Username in my User Model.

I think actually you want to remove all spaces following should do:

.gsub(/\s+/, "")

EDIT:

Oh yes, You can also use Rail's built-in method squish()

thanx to apneadiving for reminding

Digester