I can think of two directions you could go real quickly.

You could go the Rails validations way of your question method having a
side-effect that populates some other member. eg:

flash[:warning] = user.errors.get_full_messages unless user.valid?

Of you could go with the Perlish way the Regex library works:

"Cows are Cool" =~ /(\w+)/
puts $1

I prefer the side-effect method.