This blog is part of our Ruby 2.4 series.

It is a common use case to remove the nil values from a hash in Ruby.

{ "name" => "prathamesh" , "email" => nil } => { "name" => "prathamesh" }

Active Support already has a solution for this in the form of Hash#compact and Hash#compact!.

hash = { "name" => "prathamesh" , "email" => nil } hash . compact #=> { "name" => "prathamesh" } hash #=> { "name" => "prathamesh", "email" => nil} hash . compact! #=> { "name" => "prathamesh" } hash #=> { "name" => "prathamesh" }

Now, Ruby 2.4 will have these 2 methods in the language itself, so even those not using Rails or Active Support will be able to use them. Additionally it will also give performance boost over the Active Support versions because now these methods are implemented in C natively whereas the Active Support versions are in Ruby.

There is already a pull request open in Rails to use the native versions of these methods from Ruby 2.4 whenever available so that we will be able to use the performance boost.