Checking if a variable is defined?

Question

How can I check whether a variable is defined in Ruby? Is there an isset-type method available?

Answer 1

defined? is great, but if you are in a Rails environment you can also use try, especially in cases where you want to check a dynamic variable name:

foo = 1
my_foo = "foo"
my_bar = "bar"
try(:foo)        # => 1
try(:bar)        # => nil
try(my_foo)      # => 1
try(my_bar)      # => nil

Answer 2

This is useful if you want to do nothing if it does exist but create it if it doesn't exist.

def get_var
  @var ||= SomeClass.new()
end

This only creates the new instance once. After that it just keeps returning the var.

Answer 3

As many other examples show you don't actually need a boolean from a method to make logical choices in ruby. It would be a poor form to coerce everything to a boolean unless you actually need a boolean.

But if you absolutely need a boolean. Use !! (bang bang) or "falsy falsy reveals the truth".

› irb
>> a = nil
=> nil
>> defined?(a)
=> "local-variable"
>> defined?(b)
=> nil
>> !!defined?(a)
=> true
>> !!defined?(b)
=> false

Why it doesn't usually pay to coerce:

>> (!!defined?(a) ? "var is defined".colorize(:green) : "var is not defined".colorize(:red)) == (defined?(a) ? "var is defined".colorize(:green) : "var is not defined".colorize(:red))
=> true

Here's an example where it matters because it relies on the implicit coercion of the boolean value to its string representation.

>> puts "var is defined? #{!!defined?(a)} vs #{defined?(a)}"
var is defined? true vs local-variable
=> nil

Answer 4

defined?(your_var) will work. Depending on what you're doing you can also do something like your_var.nil?

Answer 5

Here is some code, nothing rocket science but it works well enough

require 'rubygems'
require 'rainbow'
if defined?(var).nil?  # .nil? is optional but might make for clearer intent.
 print "var is not defined\n".color(:red)
else
 print "car is defined\n".color(:green)
end

Clearly, the colouring code is not necessary, just a nice visualation in this toy example.

Answer 6

It should be mentioned that using defined to check if a specific field is set in a hash might behave unexpected:

var = {}
if defined? var['unknown']
  puts 'this is unexpected'
end
# will output "this is unexpected"

The syntax is correct here, but defined? var['unknown'] will be evaluated to the string "method", so the if block will be executed

edit: The correct notation for checking if a key exists in a hash would be:

if var.key?('unknown')