Is There a Better Way of Checking Nil or Length == 0 of a String in Ruby?

Question

Is there a better way than the following to check to see if a string is nil OR has a length of 0 in Ruby?

if !my_str         


        

Answer 1

variable.blank? will do it. It returns true if the string is empty or if the string is nil.

Answer 2

Every class has a nil? method:

if a_variable.nil?
    # the variable has a nil value
end

And strings have the empty? method:

if a_string.empty?
    # the string is empty
}

Remember that a string does not equal nil when it is empty, so use the empty? method to check if a string is empty.

Answer 3

Another option is to convert nil to an empty result on the fly:

(my_string||'').empty?

Answer 4

I like to do this as follows (in a non Rails/ActiveSupport environment):

variable.to_s.empty?

this works because:

nil.to_s == ""
"".to_s == ""

Answer 5

In rails you can try #blank?.

Warning: it will give you positives when string consists of spaces:

nil.blank? # ==> true
''.blank? # ==> true
'  '.blank? # ==> true
'false'.blank? # ==> false

Just wanted to point it out. Maybe it suits your needs

UPD. why am i getting old questions in my feed? Sorry for necroposting.

Answer 6

Have you tried Refinements?

module Nothingness
  refine String do
    alias_method :nothing?, :empty?
  end

  refine NilClass do
    alias_method :nothing?, :nil?
  end
end

using Nothingness

return my_string.nothing?