loopkid: the beauty of ruby 1.9

the beauty of ruby 1.9

Stefan — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 12:11:00 +0200

Let’s say we have a string and three arrays

string = "672"
java = []
ruby18 = []
ruby19 = []

Now you want to convert the string to an array of integers. If you were writing Ruby in javastyle you would probably write something like

i=0
digits = string.split(//)
while i < digits.size do
  java << digits[i].to_i
  i+=1
end

but since we’re we’re doing Ruby in rubystyle it looks more like

string.split(//).each { |digit| ruby18 << digit.to_i }

which looks much nicer, but still not quite right, but with Ruby 1.9’s chars interator it gets even better.

string.chars { |digit| ruby19 << digit.to_i }

Goes down like butter, doesn’t it? Isn’t that how it always should have been? And the good thing is, there is lots of this good stuff in Ruby 1.9. Maybe in Ruby 2.0 there will even be a to_i method in the array class, but now I’m getting carried away.

"the beauty of ruby 1.9" by Stefan

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:50:25 +0100

Wow, beautiful! Thanks for your suggestion. I have actually seen the map function before, but never used it myself. Pretty elegant. Although I don’t completely understand the ampersand-colon-syntax, it is explained here and here.

"the beauty of ruby 1.9" by Radarek

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 17:51:07 +0100

I know that you posted it some time ago but I have even simpler code for your problem:

string.chars.map(&:to_i)

or even simpler!

string.chars.map { |digit| digit.to_i }