Removing all empty elements from a hash / YAML?

Question

How would I go about removing all empty elements (empty list items) from a nested Hash or YAML file?

Answer 1

Could be done with facets library (a missing features from standard library), like that:

require 'hash/compact'
require 'enumerable/recursively'
hash.recursively { |v| v.compact! }

Works with any Enumerable (including Array, Hash).

Look how recursively method is implemented.

Answer 2

Try this to remove nil

hash = { a: true, b: false, c: nil }
=> {:a=>true, :b=>false, :c=>nil}
hash.inject({}){|c, (k, v)| c[k] = v unless v.nil?; c}
=> {:a=>true, :b=>false}

Answer 3

Here is something I have:

# recursively remove empty keys (hashes), values (array), hashes and arrays from hash or array
def sanitize data
  case data
  when Array
    data.delete_if { |value| res = sanitize(value); res.blank? }
  when Hash
    data.delete_if { |_, value| res = sanitize(value); res.blank? }
  end
  data.blank? ? nil : data
end

Answer 4

class Hash   
  def compact
    def _empty?(val)
      case val
      when Hash     then val.compact.empty?
      when Array    then val.all? { |v| _empty?(v) }
      when String   then val.empty?
      when NilClass then true
      # ... custom checking 
      end
    end

    delete_if { |_key, val| _empty?(val) }   
  end 
end

Answer 5

If you're using Ruby 2.4+, you can call compact and compact!

h = { a: 1, b: false, c: nil }
h.compact! #=> { a: 1, b: false }

https://ruby-doc.org/core-2.4.0/Hash.html#method-i-compact-21

Answer 6

I made a deep_compact method for this that recursively filters out nil records (and optionally, blank records as well):

class Hash
  # Recursively filters out nil (or blank - e.g. "" if exclude_blank: true is passed as an option) records from a Hash
  def deep_compact(options = {})
    inject({}) do |new_hash, (k,v)|
      result = options[:exclude_blank] ? v.blank? : v.nil?
      if !result
        new_value = v.is_a?(Hash) ? v.deep_compact(options).presence : v
        new_hash[k] = new_value if new_value
      end
      new_hash
    end
  end
end