Review of OOP in Ruby class

Question

Could you please review the following class products?

It should tell me whether the product is taxable or imported. Name should indicate if the product is imported or certain keywords should tell that the product is non-taxable (chocolates, book, pills)

class Product
  NON_TAXABLE = [/chocolates/, /book/, /pills/]

  def initialize(product_name)
    @product_name = product_name
  end

  def is_taxable?
    taxable = false
    NON_TAXABLE.each { |x| taxable = x.match(@product_name) if taxable }
    !taxable
  end

  def is_imported?
    /imported/.match(@product_name)
  end
end

Answer 1

Your is_taxable? function code does not seem to work. The issue is that taxable is never going to be true, so you'll never assign a new value. You want to write if !taxable instead. Your code becomes:

def is_taxable?
    taxable = false
    NON_TAXABLE.each { |x| taxable = x.match(@product_name) if !taxable }
    !taxable
end

It's still possible to make it simpler using Ruby functions on arrays.

def is_taxable?
  NON_TAXABLE.none? { |x| x.match(@product_name) }
end

This means: if my product is not among the tax-free products, then it is taxable.

Answer 2

If you change the NON_TAXABLE constant from a bunch of regular expressions to one big regular expression to rule them all, like this:

NON_TAXABLE_RE = Regexp.union(%w(chocolates books pills))

Then the is_taxable? method (I prefer taxable?) would look like this:

def is_taxable?
  not NON_TAXABLE_RE.match(@product_name) #I like the explicit 'not'
end