True, but present? is just the inverse of blank?.  What we've found
very useful is to have a method that treats blank parameters the same
as missing ones, and allows chaining.

Check out the example:

  state   = params[:state]   unless params[:state].blank?
  country = params[:country] unless params[:country].blank?
  region  = state || country || 'US'

Rewriting with present? isn't any more expressive:

  state    = params[:state]     if params[:state].present?
  country = params[:country] if params[:country].present?
  region   = state || country || 'US'

But nonblank? makes it more concise and expressive IMO:

  region = params[:state].nonblank? || params[:country].nonblank? ||
'US'

We've been using it this way for the last year and it really has
cleaned up a lot of code.  More importantly it has become a reflex to
use it inline--as shown above--that has helped us avoid bugs where we
might think a parameter was present but really it was just there with
an empty value.

I suppose we could keep the method name present? but switch its
behavior to match what's proposed here for nonblank?.  But that
contract change could break someone's code who was depending on a
boolean being returned.  Also I prefer that nonblank? has a name that
parallels nonzero? from Ruby.

I like the symmetrical pair of nonzero? and nonblank? because they map
values (0, empty/blank string respectively) to nil that are typically
equivalent to not being present at all.  Other languages like Python
found it convenient to have 0 and empty string treated as false for
just this reason I think.

-Colin

On Dec 27, 5:37 am, Pratik <pratikn...@gmail.com> wrote: