How to understand nil vs. empty vs. blank in Ruby

user_61371 0
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I find myself repeatedly looking for a clear definition of the differences of nil?, blank?, and empty? in Ruby on Rails. Here's the closest I've come:

  • blank? objects are false, empty, or a whitespace string. For example, "", " ", nil, [], and {} are blank.

  • nil? objects are instances of NilClass.

  • empty? objects are class-specific, and the definition varies from class to class. A string is empty if it has no characters, and an array is empty if it contains no items.

Is there anything missing, or a tighter comparison that can be made?

ruby-on-rails ruby
15 Answers

.nil? can be used on any object and is true if the object is nil.

.empty? can be used on strings, arrays and hashes and returns true if:

  • String length == 0
  • Array length == 0
  • Hash length == 0

Running .empty? on something that is nil will throw a NoMethodError.

That is where .blank? comes in. It is implemented by Rails and will operate on any object as well as work like .empty? on strings, arrays and hashes.

nil.blank? == true
false.blank? == true
[].blank? == true
{}.blank? == true
"".blank? == true
5.blank? == false
0.blank? == false

.blank? also evaluates true on strings which are non-empty but contain only whitespace:

"  ".blank? == true
"  ".empty? == false

Rails also provides .present?, which returns the negation of .blank?.

Array gotcha: blank? will return false even if all elements of an array are blank. To determine blankness in this case, use all? with blank?, for example:

[ nil, '' ].blank? == false
[ nil, '' ].all? &:blank? == true
user_699590

enter image description here

  • Everything that is nil? is blank?
  • Everything that is empty? is blank?
  • Nothing that is empty? is nil?
  • Nothing that is nil? is empty?

tl;dr -- only use blank? & present? unless you want to distinguish between "" and " "

user_4956370

One difference is that .nil? and .empty? are methods that are provided by the programming language Ruby, whereas .blank? is something added by the web development framework Rails.

user_387650

Just a little note about the any? recommendation: He's right that it's generally equivalent to !empty?. However, any? will return true to a string of just whitespace (ala " ").

And of course, see the 1.9 comment above, too.

user_1376410

Don't forget any? which is generally !empty?. In Rails I typically check for the presence of something at the end of a statement with if something or unless something then use blank? where needed since it seems to work everywhere.

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