Under the Hat

try is one of those small new additions in the Rails 2.3 release. Luckily I found out about it via a Railscast

What is it?

From the documentation:

Invokes the method identified by the symbol method, passing it any arguments and/or the block specified, just like the regular Ruby Object#send does. Unlike that method however, a NoMethodError exception will not be raised and nil will be returned instead, if the receiving object is a nil object or NilClass.

What did you just say?

The code above normally throws an exception if someobject is nil. By using try it just returns nil.

Don’t overuse this.