Why is ruby ignoring allow_nil?

[laredotornado]

Hi,

In my user model, I'm want to validate a field only if the field is
not empty. So I'm trying

validates_format_of :work_phone, :with => %r{^(\+\d)*\s*(\(\d{3}\)\s*)*
\d{3}(-{0,1}|\s{0,1})\d{2}(-{0,1}|\s{0,1})\d{2}$}, :allow_nil => true

but if my field, work_phone, is empty, I get the error that the format
is not valid. What is wrong with the above? - Dave

 

[Eivind Eklund]

Hi,

In my user model, I'm want to validate a field only if the field is
not empty. So I'm trying

validates_format_of :work_phone, :with => %r{^(\+\d)*\s*(\(\d{3}\)\s*)*
\d{3}(-{0,1}|\s{0,1})\d{2}(-{0,1}|\s{0,1})\d{2}$}, :allow_nil => true

but if my field, work_phone, is empty, I get the error that the format
is not valid. What is wrong with the above?

That's a Rails, not Ruby issue. While you may have some luck here,
you're more likely to have luck on the Rails mailing lists (see
http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails).

Attempting to help you, I might *guess* that the problem is that you
have an empty field (field = ""), not a nil field (field == nil), but
that is a guess - I don't know Rails and how it handles these things.

Eivind.