Syntactic sugar for dealing with empty containers

In any web application, we're often just reading a collection of rows from the database and displaying it in the browser. Often times, we'll have code that looks like this:

<% unless @friends.empty? -%>
  <% @friends.each do |friend| -%>
    <li><%= h friend.username %></li>
  <% end -%>
<% else -%>
  No friends yet
<% end -%>

I don't know why, but this kinda gets to me, and doesn't look all that neat. I probably attribute it to having to upgrade and maintain a piece of C server code that was nested 8 or 9 layers deep all in one huge main(). It might be counter-productive, but I tried to see if I could do better.

<% if @friends.each do |friend| -%>
  <li><%= h friend.username %></li>
<% end.empty? -%>
  No friends yet
<% end -%>

Well, this is kinda nice in a way that it's only one hierarchy deep. When I look at it, one section is for what to display when there are elements in the list, and one is for when there isn't. I suppose your mileage may vary. However, I didn't like the "if" in front. It obscures the intent of displaying the list. So, in the pursuit of more counter-productivity and perhaps in the spirit of pseudo-altering the language, I tried this out:

<% @friends.each do |friend| -%>
  <li><%= h friend.username %></li>
<% end.empty do -%>
  No friends yet
<% end -%>

Well, that worked. I kinda like it. Since the message was so simple, I had wanted empty() to take a message, and just display it, but because it's a "%" and not a "%=", the message won't get displayed, so I had to do it in a block. In a way, it's almost like being able to write my own "else" statement. If I had used curly braces instead of "do/end", it might look pretty close. Here's the code for empty:

class Array
  def empty(message = "")
    if self.empty?
      return block_given? ? (yield message) : message
    end
  end
end

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