How to understand nil vs. empty vs. blank in Ruby

Question

I find myself repeatedly looking for a clear definition of the differences of nil?, blank?, and empty? in Ruby on Rails. Here\'s the

Answer 1

nil? can be used on any object. It determines if the object has any value or not, including 'blank' values.

For example:

example = nil
example.nil?  # true

"".nil?  # false

Basically nil? will only ever return true if the object is in fact equal to 'nil'.

empty? is only called on objects that are considered a collection. This includes things like strings (a collection of characters), hashes (a collection of key/value pairs) and arrays (a collection of arbitrary objects). empty? returns true is there are no items in the collection.

For example:

"".empty? # true
"hi".empty?   # false
{}.empty?  # true
{"" => ""}.empty?   # false
[].empty?   # true
[nil].empty?  # false

nil.empty?  # NoMethodError: undefined method `empty?' for nil:NilClass

Notice that empty? can't be called on nil objects as nil objects are not a collection and it will raise an exception.

Also notice that even if the items in a collection are blank, it does not mean a collection is empty.

blank? is basically a combination of nil? and empty? It's useful for checking objects that you assume are collections, but could also be nil.