I found myself confronting some unexpected truths in Ruby the other day…


2.2.2 :001 > 1 and 0
=> 0
2.2.2 :002 > 0 and 1
=> 1

In most programming languages, 0 is false and 1 is true, or more accurately we say that 1 is “truthy.” In popular culture, truthiness is believing something to be true from gut feelings, rather than relying on those pesky facts. Google defines truthiness as “the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true.” This is closer to what programming languages mean. 1 is 1, but it treated as true if used within a conditional.


2.2.0 :001 > 1 == true
=> false
2.2.0 :002 > if 1
2.2.0 :003?> puts "1 is truthy"
2.2.0 :004?> else
2.2.0 :005 > puts "this doesn't happen"
2.2.0 :006?> end
1 is truthy

In Ruby, every number, every value is an instance of an object:


2.2.0 :007 > 1.class
=> Fixnum
2.2.0 :008 > true.class
=> TrueClass
2.2.0 :009 > "potato".class
=> String

So every object, is a thing, which has a value and evaluates to true in a conditional expression, which means 0 is truthy…


2.2.0 :001 > if 0
2.2.0 :002?> puts "0 is truthy"
2.2.0 :003?> else
2.2.0 :004 > puts "never gets here"
2.2.0 :005?> end
0 is truthy

So, both 0 and 1 will act like true in a conditional. @MarmiteJunction notes that this works completely as expected:


(1 and 0) ? true : false #true
(0 and 1) ? true : false #true

The last piece of the puzzle is the behavior of and which is one of the “boolean operators” and I usually think about them as evaluating to true or false, but that’s not exactly how they work.


2.2.0 :006 > "cat" or "dog"
=> "cat"
2.2.0 :007 > "nuts" and "berries"
=> "berries"

Each of boolean expressions above are truthy, but are not true. The OR expression will return the first truthy value, and the AND expression will return the last one. In other contexts, I’m used to the commutative property of AND and OR, but in Ruby that’s not at all true:


2.2.2 :001 > 1 and 0
=> 0
2.2.2 :002 > 0 and 1
=> 1

hmmm.

4 thoughts on “truthiness in ruby

  1. I usually just advise people to avoid and and or in the first place. Unless the reader comes from a strong Perl background, their usual usages (do_this and do_that where the latter depends on the former succeeding, and do_this or die(error_message)) just take Too Much Thinking to be maintainable. Their presence also tempts people to use them in calculating a boolean value. This is flat-out wrong if that value is then assigned into a variable. I cover this in slides 11 and 12 (currently) of http://bit.ly/RubyGotchas . Signed, The Codosaurus

  2. Same behavior in Lua. Lua also likes to start numbering at 1, which is all I will say about that.

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