star symbol in front of Ruby def argument

you may have seen something like this and wondered what the star symbol inside the argument parenthesis was:

def some_method(*args)
  #cowboy code goes here
end

The star symbol in front of args means that this method can accept an unlimited number of arguments. This is commonly used in Ruby on Rails when extracting options from the method arguments:

options = args.extract_options!

extract_options! is an ActiveSupport method that pulls out the option hashes from the method arguments.

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