One Man’s Walk in work

I often find myself wanting this method. This is my 3rd or 4th writing of it – it’s shorter this time. Inject is my new best friend.

class Array
  def to_hash
    inject({}) {|hash, i| hash[i[0]] = i[1]; hash}
  end
end

What this snippet does is take an array and turn it into a hash, like so

[["apple", 1], ["banana", 2], ["citrus", [3,4,5]] => 
    {"apple" => 1, "banana" => 2, "citrus" => [3,4,5]}

If I didn’t have to deal with the case where there may be subarrays, I’d use nick’s approach

Hash[*self.flatten]

My solution isn’t that much more code, and handles the case of subarrays.

Update

Ola makes the good point that this is actually the best of both worlds :

Hash[*self.flatten[1]]

Thanks Ola. …I still think inject is cool, though :).

Tags: ruby

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 1:40 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.