I'm looking for a way to convert an empty string to nil in place using Ruby. If I end up with a string that is empty spaces I can do
" ".strip!
This will give me the empty string "".
What I would like to be able to do is something like this.
" ".strip!.to_nil!
This will get an in place replacement of the empty string with nil. to_nil! would change the string to nil directly if it is .empty? otherwise if the string is not empty it would not change.
The key here is that I want it to happen directly rather than through an assignment such as
f = nil if f.strip!.empty?
The clean way is using presence.
Let's test it.
' '.presence
# => nil
''.presence
# => nil
'text'.presence
# => "text"
nil.presence
# => nil
[].presence
# => nil
{}.presence
# => nil
true.presence
# => true
false.presence
# => nil
Please note this method is from Ruby on Rails v4.2.7 https://apidock.com/rails/Object/presence