Idiomatic Ruby filter for nil-or-empty?

ruby idioms enumerable

benizi · Nov 21, 2012 · Viewed 9.9k times · Source

I'm looking for a more idiomatic way to filter out nil-or-empty elements of an array.

I have many methods of the form:

def joined
    [some_method, some_other_method].compact.reject(&:empty?).join(' - ')
end

This will take the result of some_method and some_other_method and return only the one(s) that are both non-nil (compact is essentially equivalent to reject(&:nil?)) and non-empty.

Is there anything in Array or Enumerable that gets the same thing in one shot?

Answer

In Rails, you can do reject(&:blank?), or equivalently, select(&:present?).

If this is not for a Rails app, and you do this a lot, I'd advise you to define your own helper on String or whatever else you are filtering.

class String
  alias :blank? :empty?
end

class NilClass
  def blank?
    true
  end
end

Idiomatic Ruby filter for nil-or-empty?

Answer

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