newbie question: how to read the ":"

rubyonrails-talk
1

I'm a total beginner at Ruby. I'm trying to read this code:

private   def find_cart   session[:cart] ||= Cart.new   end

I'm most comfortable with PHP code, so that biases how I read this. If I had to guess, I'd say this is saying something like "Let's create a private method called find_cart. When called, this should check the session array for a key called 'cart'. If there is no key called 'cart' in the session array yet, then we create a new Cart object and store it in the session array with a key of 'cart'."

How close did I get?

2

You're spot on, except session is a Hash, not an Array.

3

Hi --

4

Bingo, good job. That's pretty much exactly what happens.

5

Hi Jakob,

Jakob Skjerning wrote: <snip>

check the session array for a key called 'cart'.

You probably already know this, but just to make sure...

In Rails, session data is stored as a hash, not an array.

Best regards, Bill