Ruby: blank? without Rails

Question

I want to have this test:

if (line.blank?) do_stuff

...but I'm in straight ruby, not rails. What's the accepted idiom for accomplishing the same effect?

I'm doing this for a string, where testing for .empty? is not the same as testing for .blank? (An all whitespace string is not empty, but is blank.)

Answer 1

This is possible:

line.to_s.strip.empty?

Answer 2

blank? is not only defined in String, it's also part of Nil, because it is a two-fold test. It checks to see if a variable is either nil? or empty?/white space.

You can't ask a string if it's nil because it doesn't have a nil? method, but you can ask a Nil if it's nil?.

Active Support has core-extensions available, which let us cherry-pick the needed functionality and include the necessary methods. For blank? you can do:

require 'active_support/core_ext/object/blank'

See the blank? for more information and read the entire document to see what else is available. Using Active Support this way removes the need to load all of AS yet get features that are useful.