From: Jamis Buck <jgb3@...>
Date: 2004-11-03T08:34:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Converting hash keys to symbols

Florian Gross wrote:
> Jamis Buck wrote:
> 
>> Is there an elegant way of converting all of the keys of a hash to a 
>> symbol? The solution can assume that the existing keys are either 
>> strings or symbols. 
> 
> 
> Does this help?
> 
> a = Hash.new do |hash, key|
>   hash.fetch(key.is_a?(Symbol) ? key.to_s : key.to_sym, nil)
> end

Clever! That's really nice. It won't quite work for me, however, since I 
don't have control over the creation of the hash that I'm receiving.

>> Also, if a key is a string, it may contain a dash character which must 
>> be converted to an underscore.
> 
> 
> Why? Symbols can contain dash characters. See :"foo-bar", %s{foo-bar}, 
> "foo-bar".intern and "foo-bar".to_sym.

Yah, I know. But I like to use symbols so I don't *have* to type the 
quotes. :) It's a matter of convenience rather than optimization, in 
this case.

Thanks for the suggestions, Florian. Thanks, especially, for pointing 
out #to_sym. I wasn't aware of that, and I like it better than the 
less-intuitive #intern.

- Jamis

-- 
Jamis Buck
jgb3@email.byu.edu
http://www.jamisbuck.org/jamis