isNilOrEmpty is great, though I prefer my variation nilEmpty that turns empty things into nils. Slightly more flexible/chainable. The reality is that there are a lot of cases where the empty state could be nil or an empty collection/string/whatever. I try not to add to them, preferring to use the empty collection over nil, however handling both is generally a lot easier and safer than trying to prove that the data from some other system can't be dumb.