Is there a ruby function to do !(val).nil??

Question

I frequently find myself doing this:

!(val).nil?

My code would be prettier if there was a method like

val.exists?

Is there something like that?

Answer 1

you can use the unless statement, eg,

do_something unless val.nil?

which is probably pretty close to the ideal way to phrase it: if you had a non_nil? method you'd have a negated statement instead of a positive statement like this one.