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

Rails 4.1 added Hash#compact and Hash#compact! as a core extensions to Ruby's Hash class. You can use them like this:

hash = { a: true, b: false, c: nil }
hash.compact                        
# => { a: true, b: false }
hash                                
# => { a: true, b: false, c: nil }
hash.compact!                        
# => { a: true, b: false }
hash                                
# => { a: true, b: false }
{ c: nil }.compact                  
# => {}

Heads up: this implementation is not recursive. As a curiosity, they implemented it using #select instead of #delete_if for performance reasons. See here for the benchmark.

In case you want to backport it to your Rails 3 app:

# config/initializers/rails4_backports.rb

class Hash
  # as implemented in Rails 4
  # File activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/hash/compact.rb, line 8
  def compact
    self.select { |_, value| !value.nil? }
  end
end

Answer 2

our version: it also cleans the empty strings and nil values

class Hash

  def compact
    delete_if{|k, v|

      (v.is_a?(Hash) and v.respond_to?('empty?') and v.compact.empty?) or
          (v.nil?)  or
          (v.is_a?(String) and v.empty?)
    }
  end

end