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Karthikeyan Dhanapal
Karthikeyan Dhanapal

Posted on • Edited on

Redundant 'return' detected - Ruby Programming.

#ruby #rspec #programming #code

Being a Software Developer we are expected to work on new technology irrespective of language that we have previous work experience in. It's not a big deal as long as we are familiarised with the syntax of the new language.

I recently switched the job and was expected to work on ruby on rails.

I was working on a code and returning a value from a function and I don't see any error or warning in that until I used lint to check my code quality. It threw me the warning,

Redundant 'return' detected

I had no clue about this as I was sure that my code is fine. After intense googling, I found that by default ruby doesn't expect a function to return some value.

You can check the issue from this question in StackOverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1023146/is-it-good-style-to-explicitly-return-in-ruby

After modification my function looked something like this:

def some_function(x)
  y = 33
  unless x.blank?
    y = if x == 3
          10
        elsif x == 5
          16
        else
          nil
        end
  end
end
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The Drive code:

x = ''
z = some_function(x)
print z
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Even after modification my function didn't return the expected value. It was expected to return the y value as '33' which is set by default once it enters the function.

It returned nil instead of the expected output : '33'
I got confused and started debugging the code. Later I found out the problem.
The problem is, we should return the final variable in order for the function to return a value.

So instead of using 'return' keyword we can simply use the variable name at the end like this:

def some_function(x)
  y = 33
  unless x.blank?
    y = if x == 3
          10
        elsif x == 5
          16
        else
          nil
        end
  end
  y #change made here to return the final value of y
end
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so that whatever the final value of the variable is, it will be returned and this solves the issue.

Top comments (1)

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MetaDave 🇪🇺 •

Good investigation!

Idiomatic Ruby often involves an "early return", so it is possible that the following style of code, which avoids a local variable, would also work for you.

def some_function(x)
  return 33 if x.blank?

  if x == 3
    10
  elsif x == 5
    16
  else
    nil
  end
end

An if or unless at the end of a method can often be avoided in this way.