Thank you to Ben Hamill for sending me a question that prompted this post. Very often in Ruby code, we would like to execute some action only if an object is present: def slug(title) if title title.strip.downcase.tr_s('^[a-z0-9]', '-') end end slug(" Confident Code") confident-code h = {} slug(h[:missing_key]) nil Strictly speaking, we aren’t checking for object presence here. In Ruby there is alm