Ruby on Rails: Class.where(...) but return just 1 record?

I got a table named users, and I'm doing

array = User.where("username=?", username)

to get the user for a specific username.

My minor gripe is that this return开发者_运维百科s an array, and I have to do array[0] but there should always be just 1 user returned.

Is there anyway, syntactically to specify that I expect just 1 record, and it shouldn't be an array returned, just the user?

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You can limit it to one result:

User.where("username = ?", username).first

However, you might just want to use the dynamic find_by_ method:

User.find_by_username(username)

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Also you can use the limit in the case you want to get more results, but limiting.

User.where("username = ?", username).order('created_at DESC').limit(5)

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Here is another syntax to find the first record

 array = User.find(:first,:conditions => {:username => username})