Feature request: A way to check for empty values

As far as i can tell, there currently doesn’t seem to be a way to check if a value is empty or not - which seems like a basic feature for a library like this.

Especially when working with .env.example files you sometimes run into issues where someone might forget to fill out some values - having a way to ensure that the original value (before type coercion) is not empty, would be awesome.

I’ve tried using a extraAccessors (e.g. asStringNotEmpty()) but the extraAccessors doesn’t get called when the property is undefined and extraAccessors are not chainable with required().

I’d be happy to work on a PR for this, but hear some thoughts first as to how to implement this or if you would want to consider implementing this feature at all.

[evanshortiss]

I see what you mean @xuo, thanks for the explanation.

Ideally .required() itself would either check if the string is empty

I feel like this is the correct solution. If a variable is required it should be a non-empty (i.e length >= 1) string in process.env. Maybe some recent contributors have an opinion:

@todofixthis @shawnmclean @rmblstrp, any objections to required() being changed to throw if a variable is defined as an empty string?

[evanshortiss]

@todofixthis that’s good feedback since you’ve been bitten by something similar before, thank you!

@xuo let’s make the change so that required() throws an error if the variable is set to an empty string. Do you want to open a PR?