Removing all empty elements from a hash / YAML?

compact_blank (Rails 6.1+)

If you are using Rails (or a standalone ActiveSupport), starting from version 6.1, there is a compact_blank method which removes blank values from hashes.

It uses Object#blank? under the hood for determining if an item is blank.

{ a: "", b: 1, c: nil, d: [], e: false, f: true }.compact_blank
# => { b: 1, f: true }

Here is a link to the docs and a link to the relative PR.

A destructive variant is also available. See Hash#compact_blank!.

If you need to remove only nil values,

please, consider using Ruby build-in Hash#compact and Hash#compact! methods.

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

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

works for both hashes and arrays

module Helpers
  module RecursiveCompact
    extend self

    def recursive_compact(hash_or_array)
      p = proc do |*args|
        v = args.last
        v.delete_if(&p) if v.respond_to? :delete_if
        v.nil? || v.respond_to?(:"empty?") && v.empty?
      end

      hash_or_array.delete_if(&p)
    end
  end
end

P.S. based on someones answer, cant find

usage - Helpers::RecursiveCompact.recursive_compact(something)

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

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.

The recursive version of https://stackoverflow.com/a/14773555/1519240 works, but not with HashWithIndifferentAccess or other classes that are kind of Hash..

Here is the version I am using:

def recursive_compact
  inject({}) do |new_hash, (k,v)|
    if !v.nil?
      new_hash[k] = v.kind_of?(Hash) ? v.recursive_compact : v
    end
    new_hash
  end
end

kind_of?(Hash) will accept more classes that are like a Hash.

You can also replace inject({}) by inject(HashWithIndifferentAccess.new) if you want to access the new hash using both symbol and string.

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

Deep deletion nil values from a hash.

  # returns new instance of hash with deleted nil values
  def self.deep_remove_nil_values(hash)
    hash.each_with_object({}) do |(k, v), new_hash|
      new_hash[k] = deep_remove_nil_values(v) if v.is_a?(Hash)
      new_hash[k] = v unless v.nil?
    end
  end

  # rewrite current hash
  def self.deep_remove_nil_values!(hash)
    hash.each do |k, v|
      deep_remove_nil_values(v) if v.is_a?(Hash)
      hash.delete(k) if v.nil?
    end
  end

in ruby 2.7 there are standard compact and transform_values methods, on the Hash so you can do this like this:

class Hash 
  def deep_compact
    compact.transform_values{|vl| vl.is_a?(Hash) ? vl.deep_compact : vl }
  end
end

It's the neatiest implementation, imho.