Drew
Drew

Reputation: 15408

Create array of symbols

Is there a cleaner way to do something like this?

%w[address city state postal country].map(&:to_sym) 
#=> [:address, :city, :state, :postal, :country]

I would have figured %s would have done what I wanted, but it doesn't. It just takes everything between the brackets and makes one big symbol out of it.

Just a minor annoyance.

Upvotes: 151

Views: 71175

Answers (3)

Joost Baaij
Joost Baaij

Reputation: 7598

The original answer was written back in September '11, but, starting from Ruby 2.0, there is a shorter way to create an array of symbols! This literal:

%i[address city state postal country]

will do exactly what you want.

Upvotes: 398

askrynnikov
askrynnikov

Reputation: 773

%i[ ] Non-interpolated Array of symbols, separated by whitespace (after Ruby 2.0)

%I[ ] Interpolated Array of symbols, separated by whitespace (after Ruby 2.0)

%i[address city state postal country]

the cleanest way to do this is:

%w[address city state postal country].map(&:to_sym)

Upvotes: 3

Joost Baaij
Joost Baaij

Reputation: 7598

With a risk of becoming too literal, I think the cleanest way to construct an array of symbols is using an array of symbols.

fields = [:address, :city, :state, :postal, :country]

Can't think of anything more concise than that.

Upvotes: 103

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