Computer Science Programming Basics in Ruby

6.3 Hashes

Unlike arrays, which strictly use integer indices, hashes can use any data type as their index. What Ruby calls a “hash” is really a clever way of using a string data type to map quickly to a specific element inside an array.

The string is referred to as a hash key. Some kind of function must exist to map a string to a number. For example, a simple hash function could add up the ASCII codes for each letter and implement a modulo for the number of keys we have. A hash collision occurs when our hash function returns the same number for two different keys, which can be handled with various collision resolution algorithms. A simple collision resolution algorithm simply places all keys that have a collision into a bucket, and the bucket is sequentially scanned for the specific key that is requested when a collision occurs. A detailed discussion of hashing is beyond the scope of this book, but we wanted to illustrate the differences between a hash table and an array.

In most cases, strings are used to associate keys to values. For example, instead of using a two-dimensional array, we can use a hash to store student test scores by name as seen in Example 6-8. As shown, similar to arrays, line 1 creates a new hash structure. Likewise, element assignment, lines 2–4, follow the same process done for arrays.

Example 6-8. Example hash usage

    1 scores = Hash.new
    2 scores["Geraldo"] = [98, 95, 93, 96]
    3 scores["Brittany"] = [74, 90, 84, 92]
    4 scores["Michael"] = [72, 87, 68, 54