Handling Nil In Ruby

Question

In .Net there is one option for null values like a = a ?? "" + "some string value" This means if a is null take a as "" this. I want to know is there any thing like this in ruby.

Answer 1

In Ruby, you can do:

a ||= ''

this means that if a is nil or false, empty string would be assigned to it. Note that this is an expression that returns eventual value of a.

Answer 2

If you want to prepend/append it to a string, best thing to do is:

a.to_s + "some string value"

This will automatically handle even the nil values.

a = nil
a.to_s
# => ""