How to understand nil vs. empty vs. blank in Ruby

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I find myself repeatedly looking for a clear definition of the differences of nil?, blank?, and empty? in Ruby on Rails. Here’s the closest I’ve come:

  • blank? objects are false, empty, or a whitespace string. For example, "", " ", nil, [], and {} are blank.

  • nil? objects are instances of NilClass.

  • empty? objects are class-specific, and the definition varies from class to class. A string is empty if it has no characters, and an array is empty if it contains no items.

Is there anything missing, or a tighter comparison that can be made?

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