I have a Person with title, forename and surname (all of which are 
optional).  I want to return a 'pretty' name for this person in the format..

title + <space> + forename + <space> + surname

..where any extraneous spaces are removed.

My name method currently looks like this

def name
  (
   (title.to_s.strip.empty? ? "" : title.to_s.strip << " ") <<
   (forename.to_s.strip.empty? ? "" : forename.to_s.strip << " ") <<
   (surname.to_s.strip.empty? ? "" : surname.to_s.strip)
  ).strip
end

I created seven tests for this method for each combination of the three 
parameters.  All seven tests pass with this implementation.

Note.  I was half way through writing about how I should probably test 
for nil and maybe return an empty string from the three (title, 
forename, surname) methods when I realised that all I was really doing 
was testing for nil in a roundabout way; i.e. convert possible nil's to 
string then strip spaces then check for empty...

I started thinking about this some more and realised that a test for nil 
would return false which would allow me to re-write the above method 
like so..

def name
  (
   (title ? title.strip << " " : "") <<
   (forename ? forename.strip << " " : "") <<
   (surname ? surname.strip : "")
  ).strip
end

This gets rid of the nasty duplication and double question marks in the 
first method.

I also realised that I needed another test - for all nil's.  They all 
still passed.

What I was originally going to ask was how to improve on the first 
implementation above.  Even though (in my opinion) the second 
implementation is a lot cleaner I'm still interested in whether it can 
be made even more succinct as in 'the ruby way'?

It may be a very small method and have taken me about an hour to go 
through this process but I'm quite pleased as to how it's turned out.

Chris