The flip flop operator is one of those weird features of Ruby that most people aren’t even aware of. It’s one of the many Perlisms that sneaked into Ruby, but hasn’t caught on. In this post, we will look at what flip-flop operators are, and where you can use them.

What is it?

The flip flop operator is a range (..) operator used between two conditions in a conditional statement. It looks like this:

(1..20).each do |x|
  puts x if (x == 5) .. (x == 10)
end

The condition evaluates to false every time it is evaluated until the first part evaluates to true. Then it evaluates to true until the second part evaluates to true. In the above example, the flip-flop is turned on when x == 5 and stays on until x == 10, so the numbers from 5 to 10 are printed.

The flip flop operator only works inside ifs and ternary conditions. Everywhere else, Ruby considers it to be the range operator.

Another example

Let’s take another example that sheds more light on this operator’s behavior. Imagine you’re parsing a file which has markers called indent and dedent in it. Whenever you encounter a line that contains indent you need to turn ON indentation for all lines after that, and turn it OFF when you come across a line that contains dedent.

As an example, this is the text we’re trying to transform:

zero indentation
indent
inside block
dedent
after the block
indent
another block
dedent
end of file

And this is what the output should look like:

zero indentation
  indent
  inside block
  dedent
after the block
  indent
  another block
  dedent
end of file

In this case, we would need to keep track of whether or not we’ve turned on indentation. The flip-flop operator does this out of the box for us.

lines = File.readlines('somefile')

lines.each do |line|
  if line =~ /^indent/ .. line =~ /^dedent/
    puts " " + line
  else
    puts line
  end
end

Now the operator starts looking a bit more useful. You could read this as: starting from the lines containing indent, until you encounter dedent, add two spaces at the start of the line.

Is it going to be removed from Ruby?

There is an open issue in Ruby’s issue tracker asking for the feature to be removed from Ruby. This is from before Ruby 2.0 was released, and Matz stated that if it were to be removed, it would have to wait till Ruby 3.0.

Under the current plan, I am not going to remove flip-flop from 2.0, since we are not going to made incompatible changes anytime soon. We have to wait until 3.0. (–Matz)

I’m not a big fan of the syntax, and have never had to use it any of my code. If it were to be removed in the future, it wouldn’t be missed too much.

There hasn’t been any activity on this issue in the past year, so there’s no decision yet about whether or not it will disappear some day. But it’s good to be aware of the syntax in case you come across the syntax when reading other people’s code.

Links

• Feature #5400 - Remove flip-flops in 2.0 - the discussion on the Ruby issue tracker
• Deconstructing Fizz Buzz With Flip-Flops in Ruby, by Julian Simioni. Walks through a piece of obfucated fizzbuzz program using flip-flops, posted on the discussion of this post on reddit.