I am using the "stock quote" gem (https://github.com/tyrauber/stock_quote) to retrieve stock prices based on user input tickers. While I have a ticker list that is up-to-date, there are some circumstances where the search yields no results. I have this in my code to get the quote:
@companyname = StockQuote::Stock.quote(@ticker).company
@exchange = StockQuote::Stock.quote(@ticker).exchange
@price = StockQuote::Stock.quote(@ticker).last
And it yields this when @ticker = "AKO-A"
undefined method `attributes' for nil:NilClass
file: stock.rb location: block in parse line: 90
Is there anyway to avoid this nomethoderror by making my code more robust (if error then "blank")? Sorry, I am relatively new to ruby and would appreciate any help to point me in the right direction.
This is a very common condition with Ruby code, and a common idiom to return nil on a failed search.
However this specific gem is a little flaky when it fails to get a good search result. You can protect yourself against it failing by using a begin ... rescue block.
begin
stock_quote = StockQuote::Stock.quote(@ticker)
rescue StandardError
stock_quote = nil
end
if stock_quote
@companyname = stock_quote.company
@exchange = stock_quote.exchange
@price = stock_quote.last
end
This might not be ideal program flow for you, so you may need to adapt this.
Note StandardError is what gets rescued by default, I didn't need to write that. You could also put NoMethodError in your situation, and usually you want to restrict rescuing exceptions to specific parts of code where you know how to recover from the error, and also only to the types of errors where you are confident that your handling code is doing the right thing.