CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubysinatra
0xSina
0xSina

Reputation: 21573

HTML form empty textfield

I have a textfield in a form with name="test". When I enter a value in, my params hash contains that value:

 params[:test] => "value"

However, if I don't enter a value in, my params hash contains an empty string:

 params[:test] => ""

My question is, how do I tell if the user manually entered an empty string or simply ignored/did not touch the field at all?

UPDATE Ok, let me explain the real issue, maybe I am not exapling myself well. I have bunch of search fields on a page, and I need to search based on them. This is what I am doing right now:

conditions = {}
conditions[:artist_name] = s_artist_name if s_artist_name && !s_artist_name.empty?
conditions[:city] = s_city if s_city && !s_city.empty?

I have to first check if it's nil, and then check if it's emtpty? . This doesn't look good to me, I don't know...it's too much work for such a simple task. I must be missing something . Or is this how it's done? I check for nil because if I call:

xyz.com/test

params will be nil.

If I press button on test page without entering anything in the fields, params will be populated but with empty string. So then I check for empty string as well.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1500

Answers (2)

Srikanth Jeeva
Srikanth Jeeva

Reputation: 3011

Checking

value.present? checks for both nil & empty and returns true if value is not nil and not empty.
value.blank? checks for both nil & empty and returns true if value is nil or empty.

Upvotes: 2

Alex
Alex

Reputation: 161

Maybe this post will help you Is There a Better Way of Checking Nil or Length == 0 of a String in Ruby?

Got many ways that people use to check for empty values, hope this helps.

Upvotes: 0

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