I'm dealing with a bunch of arrays made of strings and many a times I've written .delete_if { |str| str.empty? }
Now, I know I can add this method to the array class myself but I'm hoping there's a built in way to do this without having non-standard methods added to base classes. As much fun as adding methods to base classes is, it's not something I wanna do for maintainability reasons.
Is there a built in method to handle this?
There is a short form
array.delete_if(&:empty?)
You can use this method:
1.9.3p194 :001 > ["", "A", "B", "C", ""].reject(&:empty?)
=> `["A", "B", "C"]`
Please note that you can use the compact method if you only got to clear an array from nils.
Well, there is Array.delete. It returns what's deleted (or nil if nothing is deleted) however, which feels clumsy. But it does deliver and does not fail on non-string elements:
ar = ['a', '', 2, 3, '']
p ar.delete('') #=> ""
p ar #=> ["a", 2, 3]
array.delete(element); arrayYou can do this
ar = ['a', '', 2, 3, '']
ar = ar.select{|a| a != ""}
I hope this will work for you
You can use .select! but you're still going to run into the same problem.
Instead of modifying array, you could create a utility class instead.
You can try below solution. I hope it ll help you.
array = ["","",nil,nil,2,3] array.delete_if(&:blank?) => [2,3]
If you also want to remove nil:
arr = ['',"",nil,323]
arr.map!{|x|x==''?nil:x}.compact!
=> [323]
Map, ternary operator, compact
For simple work around:
my_array = ['a', '', 2, 3, '']
compact_array = my_array.select(&:present?)
# => ["a", 2, 3]
Here:
We select only item of array that ruby think it's present while
nil and "" is not present? in ruby
.present? is a rails method.
As of Rails 5.2, Enumerable now supports .compact_blank, which does precisely what you're asking for:
[1, "", nil, 2, " ", [], {}, false, true, 3].compact_blank
# => [1, 2, true, 3]
It works on hashes as well, removing pairs that have a blank value.
compact!method :)