Ruby Quick Syntax Reference

CHAPTER 5

Hashes

A hash in Ruby is a dictionary-style collection, also known as an associative array in other programming languages. Rather than using integer-based indexes, a hash uses any object as the key.

Creating Hashes

To create a hash within Ruby, we can simply use the {} braces, surrounding a set of elements. We can also initialize an empty hash using the empty {} braces:

2.1.1 :001 > score = { "Joe Bloggs" => 10, "Sarah Bloggs" => 8 } => {"Joe Bloggs"=>10, "Sarah Bloggs"=>8}2.1.1 :002 > stock = {} => {}

When creating a hash, an alternative syntax is available using symbols as the index, this is shown by using the :key_name syntax, which ...