kyle conarro

I recently started using the handy Saddle gem by Airbnb’s Mike Lewis to speed up the development of Ruby API clients. Since some of our code runs on Ruby 1.8, I quickly got to work adding 1.8 support for Saddle.

While working out compatibility issues, I came across a strange error when running the test suite. After digging through Faraday (the underlying HTTP client used in Saddle), and FaradayMiddleware, I finally uncovered the issue:

The splat operator handles nil differently in Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9

A quick test

To confirm my suspicion, I did a quick test in both Ruby versions:

def test_splat *args
  args
end

Ruby 1.8.7

irb> test_splat(nil)
=> [nil]

Ruby 1.9.3

irb> test_splat(nil)
=> []

Saddle originally relied on Ruby 1.9’s treatment of *nil to return an empty array when passing arguments to FaradayMiddleware. Adding 1.8 support revealed this dependency and forced me to handle *nil in the Saddle code instead.

Conclusion

When using Ruby’s handy splat operator, be sure to account for differences in Ruby versions. In my case, the fix was simple, but finding the culprit took some time.