The Ruby Way: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming, Second Edition

9.1. Working with Sets

We’ve already seen how certain methods of the Array class let it serve as an acceptable representation of a mathematical set. But for a little more rigor and a little tighter coding, Ruby has a Set class that hides more of the detail from the programmer.

A simple require makes the Set class available:

require 'set'

This also adds a to_set method to Enumerable so that any enumerable object can be converted to a set.

Creating a new set is easy. The [] method works much as for hashes. The new method takes an optional enumerable object and an optional block. If the block is specified, it is used as a kind of “preprocessor” for the list (like a map operation).

s1 = Set[3,4,5] # {3,4,5} in math notation arr = [3,4,5] s2 = Set.new(arr) ...