Elixir remove nil from list

Question

I got the following structure:

[nil,
 %{attributes: %{updated_at: ~N[2017-09-21 08:34:11.899360]},
 ...]

I want to remove the nils. How do I do that? Tried Enum.reduce/3 but it didn't work.

Solution

Enum.filter/2 comes to the rescue:

Enum.filter(list, & !is_nil(&1))

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If you are certain there could not be false atoms in the list (the other possible falsey value in Elixir,) the filter might be simplified to:

Enum.filter(list, & &1)

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Also (credits to @Dogbert) there is a counterpart function Enum.reject/2 that “returns elements of enumerable for which the function fun returns false or nil.”

Enum.reject(list, &is_nil/1)

Comments

[Sardoan]

Ahhh, nice. Tried something like List.delete. Filter, thanks. Solution was data = Enum.filter(data, & !is_nil(&1))

[Sardoan]

False is not included, so I need only to check for nil. Your solution works perfect. Thanks again :) I make a query before for the last changes in the databse. With a new databse I got some nils and had to remove them.

[Dogbert]

Also: Enum.reject(list, &is_nil/1).

[sambecker]

Enum.reject(list, &is_nil/1) is particularly elegant—nice solution

[Julia]

Hi! Please edit your answer to expand a little bit upon how the code snippet you posted works. Thanks!