TIL: Rails Squish

A coworker submitted a pull request with this line:

identifier = input_string.squish.split('-').last

I accepted the code as is, but right before deploy, a superior programmer asked:

“What does squish do?”

Oh wow, that programmer was right. What does squish do? I have never seen it before.

Honestly, because squish is a normal word in English, I totally glossed over it in my review.

Without any context, I had no idea what squish does… I’m assuming the function does the right thing since I know the programmer that wrote the pull request and would not submit intentionally destructive code.

But what does “squishing” a string mean?? Does any other programming language have it? How do those language handle it?

I had no idea, I had a balanced feeling of being uncomfortable and making sense.

Of course, a quick search turned up documentation on the function.

The documentation explains that squishing a string removes any extra whitespace. For example:

"  This\n    \n is \t\t\t an\n    input    string      ".squish # => "This is an input string"

Nifty!

When I see this in action, of course I know what a squished string is: just remove all the extra whitespace!

This function only exists in Rails, not Ruby. The equivalent function in Ruby would be:

"  This\n    \n is \t\t\t an\n    input    string      ".split.join(' ') # => "This is an input string"

So it looks like Rails just maps squish to: split.join(' '), which is kind of good and bad.

• Good: another function so I don’t have to remember how to ‘squish’.
• Bad: another function so I have to remember about ‘squish’ on pull requests.

Or maybe if I remember squish visually:

Now I’ll definitely remember it for pull requests!