Axon Flux // A Ruby on Rails Blog

def zipcode_and_name
  @zipcode_and_name ||= "#{zipcode} #{name}"
end

The ||= operator is a so-called conditional assignment that only assigns the value on its right to the variable on its left if the variable is not true. Since pretty much everything in Ruby evaluates to true when coerced into a boolean (except nil and, of course, false, as well as a couple of other things) this is exactly what we want: The first call returns the actual string and from the second time on, no matter how often the method is called on the same object, the “cached” result will be used.