From: Wilson Bilkovich <wilsonb@...>
Date: 2005-08-11T02:00:50+09:00
Subject: Re: NEWBIE QUESTION: pattern with nil

Rails defines a method called "blank?" on the class Object.
Here's what it looks like:

 # "", "   ", nil, and 0 are all blank
  def blank?
    if respond_to?(:empty?) && respond_to?(:strip)
      strip.empty?
    elsif respond_to? :empty?
      empty?
    elsif respond_to? :zero?
      zero?
    else
      !self
    end
  end


On 8/10/05, Austin Ziegler <halostatue@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/10/05, BearItAll <bearitall@rassler.co.uk> wrote:
> > On Wed, 10 Aug 2005 14:44:15 +0900, John Carter wrote:
> > > class NilClass
> > >    def empty?
> > >      true
> > >    end
> > > end
> > > if a.empty?
> > I vote for this one because a good programmer is a lazy sod. Where ever
> > you would end up doing a thing more than once, write it is such a way that
> > you never have to type it again.
> 
> Just, please, don't do it in a library that you unleash on the rest of
> the world. It changes the contract for +nil+, and I prefer that it
> *not* respond to #empty?, because the concept isn't *quite* accurate.
> One may as well define #zero? if you're going to to that (but +nil+
> isn't zero, either, just as it isn't the empty string or array).
> Better is to use the foo.nil? or foo.empty? construct and be explicit,
> or foo.to_s.empty? if you want to silently cast ("normalize").
> Changing nil to respond to #empty? is an implicit change that also
> changes its meaning.
>