probably asked already but I couldn't find it.. here are 2 common situation (for me while programming rails..) that are frustrating to write in ruby:

"a string".match(/abc(.+)abc/)[1]

in this case I get an error because the string doesn't match, therefore the [] operator is called upon nil. What I'd like to find is a nicer alternative to the following:

temp="a string".match(/abc(.+)abc/); temp.nil? ? nil : temp[1]

in brief, if it didn't match simply return nil without the error

The second situation is this one:

var = something.very.long.and.tedious.to.write
var = something.other if var.nil?

In this case I want to assign something to var only if it's not nil, in case it's nil I'll assign something.other..

Any suggestion? Thanks!