Ruby Data Types

Question

Which two of these three expressions are equal? Why?

{ "city" => "Miami", "state" => "Florida" }
{ :city => "Miami", :state => "Florida" }
{ city: "Miami", state: "Florida" }

"which" is trivial to check in an IRB session. And answer to the "why" is "because that's how it works" — Sergio Tulentsev, Nov 05 '19 at 16:56
try them in irb :) look wich give you the same types on the keys in the hash. NOTE: use ruby >= 2.0.0 — Horacio, Nov 05 '19 at 17:00
@CarySwoveland after ruby 1.9 they introduce a "new" (now old) hash syntax http://effectif.com/ruby/update-your-project-for-ruby-19-hash-syntax — Horacio, Nov 05 '19 at 17:23
What does the documentation say? What did your experiments tell you? — Jörg W Mittag, Nov 05 '19 at 19:11

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 05 '19 at 17:04

There is a great discussion on using a Ruby :symbol vs a String in another question here.

And here's a nice discussion about the difference between the fat arrow => syntax vs colons : in Ruby.

You can quickly check that the two hashes using :symbols are equivalent to each other, which are both different from the hash using strings:

a = {"city" => "Miami", "state" => "Florida"}
b = {:city => "Miami", :state => "Florida"}
c = {city: "Miami", state: "Florida"}

a == b
=> false

a == c
=> false

b == c
=> true

"[How do I ask and answer homework questions?](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/334822/128421)" is useful. — the Tin Man, Nov 05 '19 at 21:50

Ruby Data Types

1 Answers1