Converting nil

Check C,C++,Java, JavaScript or any other langugage which treats “nil” as something different–probably a meaning equivalent to “a person having 5 hands”. But in Ruby you may use

nil.to_s —>> “0″

nil.to_i —->> 0

Is this really breaking the original stream of programming languages?

blank,empty and nil in Ruby

Object.blank?

Returns true if:
> it’s an empty array
> it’s an empty string
> !self evaluates to true

[].blank? #=> true
[1].blank? #=> false
[nil].blank? #=> false
nil.blank? #=> true
true.blank? #=> false
false.blank? #=> true
"".blank? #=> true
" ".blank? #=> true
" i ".blank? #=> false

String.empty?

"hello".empty? #=> false
"".empty? #=> true

Array.empty?
[].empty? #=> true

Hash.empty?
{}.empty? #=> true

NilClass.nil?
nil.nil? => true

Object.nil?
nil.nil? => true
.nil? => false
nil.inspect ? "nil"

Ruby nil is kicking you

Ruby is said to be a genuine Object Oriented Language. Everything is an object; even a class and moreover even nil.
Basically nil tells you about an absence of a value (or an otherwise meaningless value). n/a is a good candidate for a nil value.
The nil value is distinct from all other values. However, when we force Ruby to evaluate nil as a Boolean, it evaluates to false.

“Prayas” if nil
=> nil

“Prayas” if !nil
=> Prayas

The only values that evaluate to false Booleans are nil and false. Everything other than nil or false evaluates to true when forced into a Boolean. Zero is also evaluated as true(not as false) great!!!!

“Prayas” if false
=> nil

“Prayas” if nil
=> nil

“Prayas” if -5
=> Prayas

“Prayas” if 0
=> Prayas

nil.methods # gives you all methos

But here I am interested for methods which starts with to_. Lets gather those.

nil.methods.grep(/^to_.$/)
[”to_f”, “to_a”, “to_s”, “to_i”]

And what are they giving to me:

nil.methods.grep(/^to_.$/).each do |method_name|
puts “nil.#{method_name} :: #{nil.send(method_name).inspect}”
end

o/p
nil.to_f :: 0.0
nil.to_a :: []
nil.to_s :: “”
nil.to_i :: 0

Convert a nil value to 0 in order to avoid crash.
a = 25
b = nil
c = nil
d = “mystring”
p a||=0 # returns 25 as a is not nil
p b||=0 # returns 0 as b is nil
p c.to_i # returns 0 as nil is casted to int ,i.e other way
p d||=0 # returns “mystring” as d is not nil

so we got TWO ways to convert nil value to 0
1. using myvar ||= 0
2. using myvar.to_i OR (to_f, to_a, to_s, to_i )

How to handle when you get a crash because of nil?

def mymethod(para1)
p para1.to_s.upcase
#p para1.upcase
end

mymethod(”Prayas”)
mymethod(”Attempting”)
mymethod(nil)

o/p:
PRAYAS
ATTEMPTING
“”
The .to_s allows nil to be passed in without failure.
Without the .to_s you would receive this:(i.e if you use para1.upcase)
undefined method `upcase’ for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)

In your views you may use something like to avoid crash
<%= @instance_name.variable_name rescue nil %>