Weird behavior of case/when

Ruby
1

I’m getting a very weird result using case/when.

$ cat test.rb
def test(a)
case a.class
when Class
puts “class”
when String
puts “string”
else
puts “else”
end
end

test(Float)
test(“hello”)
test(42)
$ ruby test.rb
class
class
class
$ ruby --version
ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-24) [i686-linux]

I would have exepected the following output:

class
string
else

Does anyone have an explanation about this issue?

Cheers,

2

Nicolas Desprès schrieb:

I’m getting a very weird result using case/when.
(…)

Nicolas, why do you find it weird? Have you read the documentation, for
example

Expressions

Regards,
Pit

3

case a.class
test(“hello”)
class
string
else

Does anyone have an explanation about this issue?

Cheers,

case uses === which is well defined for obj === class.
What you do is checking the class of a.class which is a class itself.

To make it short: use ‘case a’ instead of ‘case a.class’

cheers

Simon

4

On 7/12/06, Kroeger, Simon (ext) [email protected] wrote:

case uses === which is well defined for obj === class.
What you do is checking the class of a.class which is a class itself.

To make it short: use ‘case a’ instead of ‘case a.class’

Thank you. I knew that case uses === but I would have never expected
that it behaves this way.

Regards,

5

Nicolas Desprès wrote:

Regards,

It should behave that in a language where classes are objects :smiley: (unlike
java where instances of java.lang.Class are just proxies to vm
internals)

lopex