When submitting forms in a web app, you often need to check whether a variable is set and not an empty string, because unfilled text input fields will be set but empty. In OpenACS there was a procedure called exists_and_not_null for this.

In Ruby you could do something like:

if params[:string] and !params[:string].empty?

However, that is both laborious and risky. If the variable happened to be something else than a string, calling empty? would bomb.

Fortunately, Rails defines a pretty much undocumented method blank?. blank? is defined in the Object class so every possible class in a Rails app will respond to it. By default, blank? returns true only for nil, false, an empty array or hash and "" (an empty string, after stripping the whitespace). Of course, you can overwrite the method in your own classes to make blank? behave as you please for them.

>> 5.blank?
=> false
>> o = Object.new
=> #
>> o.blank?
=> false
>> n = nil
=> nil
>> n.blank?
=> true
>> n = ""
=> ""
>> n.blank?
=> true
>> f = false
=> false
>> f.blank?
=> true

So using blank? you can replace the code above by

unless params[:string].blank?

and you’re good to go. Enjoy!