Rails - Given @Comments - how to obtain the 2nd to last comment w/o rehitting the db

Question

given @comments which can contain 1 or more records. How do I obtain the 2nd to last comment?

Thanks

Answer 1

I suppose that would also be called the penultimate record:

@comments[-2] 

Here are the docs¹ to Ruby's interesting index operator.

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^{1. Rubyists, note how I linked this. If you take the version out of your ruby-doc links the reference will be durable and recent.}

Answer 2

With any Ruby array, you can specify any range or specific index, for example if you wanted every comment from the second oldest to the second newest you could do like:

@comments[1..-2] 

And to get just the second to last:

@comments[-2] 

Documentation for Ruby Array#range

In Rails, if you wanted the last two comments, then you could do this, which returns an array of the last two:

@comments.last(2) 

Documentation for ActiveRecord::FinderMethods