How to check if a string is blank in Elixir

Question

I mean a string is blank if it's empty or contains whitespaces only. For example, "", " " and "\n" are all blank.

In Rails, we have the .blank? method.

Is there something similar in Elixir (or in the Phoenix Framework)?

Answer 1

String.trim/1 seems to do the trick as of Elixir 1.3.0.

strip still works, but it was soft deprecated in the 1.3.0 release and it isn't listed in the String docs.

Answer 2

There is String.strip/1 which will convert your 3 examples to "" which you can compare against.

iex(4)> String.strip("\n") == "" true iex(5)> String.strip("") == ""   true iex(6)> String.strip("    ") == "" true 

There was an issue about it https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/pull/2707