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Marcos Henrique
Marcos Henrique

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Refactoring many OR statements like a ninja 🀘

Scenario πŸ™„

Let's supose we have to check which animals are bird, a Junior developer would made something like this:

if (animal === 'πŸ“' || animal === '🐦'|| animal === '🐧' || animal === 'πŸ¦‰') {
  console.log(`I'm bird, pew pew`);
}
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But according with Clean Code, uncle Bob if he saw this maybe would have this reaction:

Refactoring πŸ₯³

Many || statements are a little too verbose and in addition have poor readability, so how we can improve this situation.

We can apply a nice concept, create an array (or list) with all comparasions and test if our animal are included on this array (or list)

Let's check some code to clarify the idea 😏

In javascript 😎

if (['πŸ“', '🐦', '🐧', 'πŸ¦‰'].includes(animal)) {
  console.log(`I'm bird, pew pew`);
}
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In C# πŸ±β€πŸ’»

if (new List<string> {"πŸ“", "🐦", "🐧", "πŸ¦‰"}.Contains(animal)) {
  System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("I'm bird, pew pew")
}
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In Python 🐍

if animal in ["πŸ“", "🐦", "🐧", "πŸ¦‰"]:
  print "I'm bird, pew pew"
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In Clojure πŸ€“

(if (string/includes? ["πŸ“", "🐦", "🐧", "πŸ¦‰"] #animal)
  (println "I'm bird, pew pew"))
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In Elixir 🍷

if Enum.member?(["πŸ“", "🐦", "🐧", "πŸ¦‰"], animal) do
  IO.puts "I'm bird, pew pew"
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Much more elegant isn't it?
🍻

Top comments (1)

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jasterix profile image
Jasterix

Great article. For the JavaScript block, where/how are you defining animal?

if (['πŸ“', '🐦', '🐧', 'πŸ¦‰'].includes(animal)) {
  console.log(`I'm bird, pew pew`);
}