Converting an empty string into nil in Ruby

Posted by adi92 on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by adi92
Published on 2009-03-15T05:59:52Z Indexed on 2010/05/25 21:31 UTC
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I have a string called word and a function called infinitive such that
word.infinitive would return another string on some occasions and an empty string otherwise
I am trying to find an elegant ruby one line expression for the code-snippet below

if word.infinitive == ""
      return word
else return word.infinitive

Had infinitive returned nil instead of "", I could have done something like

(word.infinitive or word)

But since it does not, I can't take advantage of the short-circuit OR
Ideally I would want
1) a single expression that I could easily embed in other code
2) the function infinitive being called only once
3) to not add any custom gems or plugins into my code

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