One thing that might not be immediately obvious is that an empty string in a conditional in Ruby will return true. See for yourself:

irb(main):006:0> puts "Whoa" if ""
(irb):6: warning: string literal in condition
Whoa

The same holds true for other empty things — say, arrays:

irb(main):008:0> puts "See?" if []
See?
=> nil

Pure Ruby will let you call .empty? (on some methods — it’s not standard on Object though!), but code like this is silly and it’s easy to forget:

irb(main):003:0> puts "We have some meaningful value" if str and !str.empty?
=> nil

But Rails makes this easy for us. Rails extends Object to add a present? method. present? is literally defined as !blank?, which is almost always what I actually want to check for: it’s not nil, or “blank”, like a string that’s just whitespace, or empty constructs like [] or {}:

irb(main):009:0> nil.blank?
=> true
irb(main):010:0> [].present?
=> false
irb(main):011:0> "     ".present?
=> false
irb(main):012:0> 0.present?
=> true

Hardly an earth-shattering development, but it’s a handy tool that seems underused.