Rails Queries not Finding Nil Values

I had some queries that were not working and I couldn’t figure out how to make them work.  Basically, I was looking for fields with nil values, so I tried:

Model.where(‘variable = ?’, nil)….and didn’t get any results

So just for the heck of it, I tried:

Model.where(‘variable != ?’, nil)…but still no results.  How is that possible?  It either has to be a value or it isn’t right?

Well, apparently you can’t use normal comparison operands with nil/null.  However, instead of =, you can compare for nil using <=>

So I ended up doing:

Model.where(‘variable <=> ?’, nil)

and it worked, finding the nil values.

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