Best ruby idiom for “nil or zero”

Question

I am looking for a concise way to check a value to see if it is nil or zero. Currently I am doing something like:

if (!val || val == 0)
  # Is nil or zero
e         


        

Answer 1

You can use case if you like:

 case val with nil, 0
      # do stuff
 end

Then you can use anything that works with ===, which is nice sometimes. Or do something like this:

not_valid = nil, 0
case val1 with *not_valid
      # do stuff
 end
 #do other stuff
 case val2 with *not_valid, false    #Test for values that is nil, 0 or false
      # do other other stuff
 end

It's not exactly good OOP, but it's very flexible and it works. My ifs usually end up as cases anyway.

Of course Enum.any?/Enum.include? kind of works too ... if you like to get really cryptic:

if [0, nil].include? val
    #do stuff
end

The right thing to do is of course to define a method or function. Or, if you have to do the same thing with many values, use a combination of those nice iterators.