Clearing Empty Strings from an Array

Question

I'm dealing with a bunch of arrays made of strings and many a times I've written .delete_if { |str| str.empty? }

Now, I know I can add this method to the array class myself but I'm hoping there's a built in way to do this without having non-standard methods added to base classes. As much fun as adding methods to base classes is, it's not something I wanna do for maintainability reasons.

Is there a built in method to handle this?

Answer 1

There is a short form

array.delete_if(&:empty?)

Answer 2

You can use this method:

    1.9.3p194 :001 > ["", "A", "B", "C", ""].reject(&:empty?)
    => `["A", "B", "C"]`

Please note that you can use the compact method if you only got to clear an array from nils.