Imagine you want to filter out the nil elements in an array. There are many ways to do this in Ruby:

# common, but suboptimal
array.reject(&:nil?)
array.delete_if(&:nil?)
array.select { |e| !e.nil? }

# optimal
array.compact

But there’s a slightly weirder way to achieve this, courtesy of the often forgotten Enumerable#grep_v (the inverse of Enumerable#grep):

array.grep_v(nil)
array.grep_v(NilClass)

The last invocation might be somewhat surprising, but that works because grep_v internally uses === (or rather its negation) to match against elements of the receiver. That’s why you can also use grep_v with ranges like this:

# take only the elements that are not between 2 and 5
(1..10).grep_v 2..5                #=> [1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]

# it takes an optional block as well
(1..10).grep_v(2..5) { |v| v * 2 } #=> [2, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20]

Or with any Class:

["one", 1, 2, "two"].grep_v(String) #=> [1, 2]

Kind of weird, but in an useful way. Same as grep, of course.

That’s all I have for you today. Keep Ruby weird!