The Difference Between nil?, empty?, and blank? in Ruby

In ruby, you can use the nil? method on an instance to check if it’s nil. However, ruby also provides empty? and there’s a blank? method in Rails. For a new ruby programmer, it can get quite confusing. This post tries to explain which method to use when.

nil?

As expected, you can use nil? to check if an object is nil.

irb(main):001:0> nilObject = nil
=> nil
irb(main):002:0> nilObject.nil?
=> true
irb(main):003:0> data = Hash.new
=> {}
irb(main):004:0> data.nil?
=> false

empty?

You can use this method on strings, arrays, and hashes. It returns true in the following cases:

1. String doesn’t have any characters, i.e. str.length == 0
2. Array doesn’t contain any elements, i.e. arr.length == 0
3. Hash doesn’t have any key-value pairs, i.e. hash.length == 0

It’s important to note that an object can be empty and not nil. For example:

irb(main):005:1* names = []
=> []
irb(main):006:0> names.nil?
=> false
irb(main):007:0> names.empty?
=> true

If you try to call .empty? on a nil object, ruby throws NoMethodError.

irb(main):012:0> nilObject.empty?
Traceback (most recent call last):
        4: from /usr/local/opt/ruby/bin/irb:23:in `<main>'
        3: from /usr/local/opt/ruby/bin/irb:23:in `load'
        2: from /usr/local/Cellar/ruby/3.0.0_1/lib/ruby/gems/3.0.0/gems/irb-1.3.0/exe/irb:11:in `<top (required)>'
        1: from (irb):12:in `<main>'
NoMethodError (undefined method `empty?' for nil:NilClass)

blank?

This is a nice syntactic sugar implemented in Rails. An object is blank if it’s nil, false, or empty. For example, nil,false, '', [], {}are all blank.

You can think of blank? as a shorthand for the following code.

!val || val.empty?

In addition, .blank? returns true if a string contains only whitespace characters.

"  ".blank? # true

Rails also provides present?, which is the opposite of blank? checks if the value is not blank.

Hope that simplifies things a little.