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Learn Ruby from Scratch

Conditionals Return Values

Learn how conditional statements return values and how that can be useful.

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Another extremely useful aspect about if and unless statements in Ruby is that they return values.

An if statement, with all of its branches, evaluates the value returned by the statement that was last evaluated, just like a method does.

Example

For example, take a look at this:

Ruby
number = 5
if number.even?
  puts "The number is even"
else
  puts "The number is odd"
end

We can also assign the return value of the if statement to a variable, and then output it:

Ruby
number = 5
message = if number.even?
  "The number is even"
else
  "The number is odd"
end
puts message

Also, for the same reason, if we define a method that contains nothing but a single if/else statement, the method again returns the last statement evaluated:

Ruby
def message(number)
  if number.even?
    "The number is even"
  else
    "The number is odd"
  end
end
puts message(2)
puts message(3)

The first method call, message(2), outputs The number is even, and the second, message(3), outputs The number is odd.