What is the point of object.presence?

Question

In the Rails docs, the example provided for the object.presence method is:

region = params[:state].presence || params[:country].presence || \'US\'
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Answer 1

I just used it in a useful way I found neat. My variable is a string, if it's the empty string i want nil, otherwise I want it converted to an integer.

 x.presence.try(&:to_i)

 "".presence.try(&:to_i) # => nil
 "22".presence.try(&:to_i) # => 22