Best ruby idiom for “nil or zero”

Question

I am looking for a concise way to check a value to see if it is nil or zero. Currently I am doing something like:

if (!val || val == 0)
  # Is nil or zero
e         


        

Answer 1

Rails does this via attribute query methods, where in addition to false and nil, 0 and "" also evaluate to false.

if (model.attribute?) # => false if attribute is 0 and model is an ActiveRecord::Base derivation

However it has its share of detractors. http://www.joegrossberg.com/archives/002995.html