Understanding blank?, present?, empty?, any?, and nil? in Ruby (and Rails)

In Ruby on Rails, there are several methods available for checking the state of an object.

The most common ones include:

• blank?
• present?
• empty?
• any?
• nil?

It can be pretty confusing to know which method to use and when. For instance, blank? and empty? sound like they would behave the same way. However, they are NOT the same.

Take the following example:

nil.blank?
=> true

nil.empty?
=> NoMethodError

As you can see, these two methods respond differently to nil and are not interchangeable.
It's helpful to understand the nuances of these different state-checking methods so you aren't caught off guard by unexpected behavior.

Let's dive in.

1. blank?

blank? is a Rails method defined at the Object class level meaning you can call it on any object. An object is blank if it’s false, empty, or a whitespace string.

docs

Examples:

[].blank?
=> true

{}.blank?
=> true

''.blank?
=> true

' '.blank?
=> true

false.blank?
=> true

nil.blank?
=> true

2. present?

present? is another Rails method that is defined at the Object class level. It behaves the opposite of blank?. In other words, it returns true for objects that are true, not empty, and not a whitespace string.

docs

Examples:

[1, 2, 3].present?
=> true

{1:'Dog', 2: 'Cat'}.present?
=> true

'poop'.present?
=> true

'hi'.present?
=> true

true.present?
=> true

nil.present?
=> false

Note 📝

• blank? and present? are direct opposites.
• blank? and present? can be called on any object type including nil. This may be too all-encompassing and undesirable in some cases. For example, say you expect your data to never be nil. If your data ends up as nil due to some bug in your codepath, these two state-checking methods will make it harder to uncover that fact as opposed to methods like any? or empty? which would throw a NoMethodError for nil. Keep in mind that for stricter type-checking purposes, blank? and present? may be unsuitable.

3. nil?

nil? is a Ruby method defined at the Object class level so it can be called on any object similar to the first two. nil? only return true for nil.

docs

Examples:

[].nil?
=> false

{}.nil?
=> false

''.nil?
=> false

' '.nil?
=> false

false.nil?
=> false

nil.nil?
=> true

4. empty?

empty? is a Ruby method defined for classes including String, Hash, and Array and will evaluate to true if the length of the object it is called on is 0.

In particular:

• For strings, empty? evaluates to true if the string has a length of zero. docs - String

• For hashes, empty? returns true if the hash contains no key-value pairs. docs - Hash

• For arrays, empty? returns true if the array contains no elements. docs - Array

Examples:

[].empty?
=> true

{}.empty?
=> true

''.empty?
=> true

' '.empty?
=> false

nil.empty?
=> NoMethodError

Note 📝

• blank? and empty? respond differently to strings containing whitespace characters.

" ".length
=> 1

" ".blank?
=> true

" ".empty?
=> false

blank? may be more suitable for rejecting data with whitespace characters.

5. any?

docs

any? is a Ruby method defined for the Enumerable module, which encompass collection classes including Array and Hash. It returns true if at least one of the collection member is not false or nil.

Examples:

[false].any?
=> false

[true].any?
=> true

[].any?
=> false

{}.any?
=> false

''.any?
=> NoMethodError

nil.any?
=> NoMethodError

It's worth calling out that any? is NOT a direct opposite of empty?, like present? and blank? are. It's also worth calling out that truthiness of the elements within the collection matters for any?, unlike the other methods discussed here.

Consider the following:

[false, nil].any?
=> false

[false, nil].empty?
=> false

[false, nil].present?
=> true

Additionally,

any? can accept a block. Each element of the collection gets passed to the block, and the method will evaluate to true if the block ever returns a value that is not false or nil.

Examples:

[1, 2, 3].any? { |number| number.even? }
=> true

['poop', 'soup', 'loop'].any? { |word| word == 'poop' }
=> true

[2, 4, 6].any? { |number| number.odd? }
=> false

Conclusion

References:

• How to understand nil vs. empty vs. blank in Ruby
• Differences Between #nil?, #empty?, #blank?, and #present?