Comments on: Empty Variables

By: James

James — Thu, 27 May 2010 19:37:27 +0000

I am having this problem right now – thanks for clarifying!

By: hoopla

hoopla — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:31:02 +0000

i suffered the same issue when I began.

By: sompylasar

sompylasar — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 11:57:45 +0000

Am I missing something or the table above states the opposite to “Similarly, it is important to note that zero (0 and “0″) evaluates to true using 0.blank?.”

It says FALSE, FALSE on rows with 0 and “0″ and column “x.blank?**”.

By: Chuck Vose

Chuck Vose — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:45:28 +0000

@Tyler for those who read this later (I’m assuming you already found your solution).

It is a common idiom in ruby to say something like:
person.network.name if person.network
or
person.network.name unless person.network.nil?

Since a relationship will never return false you really only have to worry about nullity. This is why both above lines work just fine.

The reason Rails and Ruby don’t return nothing in this context is because nothing is very different than nil. Someone once told me that nothing means you have a phone but no phone-number, null is when you don’t have a phone and your house isn’t even capable of having a phone even if you did have one.

Besides, returning nothing would break if person.network.name :)

By: Php Developer

Php Developer — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 08:38:08 +0000

yes when i start programming with ruby and when switch to PHP i faced same issue.

By: Tyler

Tyler — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 15:55:10 +0000

Like many, I started in php and have been switched over to rails for a few months now. So I have a continuing problem along these lines. Say I have a person object and person “belongs_to :network”. Then if i have a person that for whatever reason doesn’t have a network, and I say “person.network.name”, I get an error. Is there a way to just make it return nothing like php instead of raising an error?

By: feng

feng — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 05:10:24 +0000

thanks~

By: Toronto PHP

Toronto PHP — Tue, 12 May 2009 03:24:15 +0000

I agree, this leaves too much room for error, not a good idea.

By: d x m i o . c o m » Links for 09/24/2008

d x m i o . c o m » Links for 09/24/2008 — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 10:50:04 +0000

[...] PHP and Rails: variable differences [...]

By: Custom PHP

Custom PHP — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 22:53:38 +0000

Might mess someone up if they are going back and forth or working on PHP apps while working on Ruby apps.