From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2005-07-13T02:10:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Question: arrays v. ranges and *.each

On Jul 12, 2005, at 11:50 AM, David Douthitt wrote:

> The results of the following code just seem strange to me:
>
>   print "\nTry 1:"
>   print [1..10].class, "\n"

[ ... ] builds an Array.  1..10 builds a Range.  So Ruby sees this as  
an Array with a single member, a Range.

As an aside, you should look into puts():

puts [1..10].class # no newline needed!

>   [1..10].each { |x| print x, "\n" }

So here we are printing the one member, the Range.

>   print "\nTry 2:"
>   print [1..10].pop.class, "\n"

Here we remove the Array's one member (again a Range) and show its  
class.

>   [1..10].pop.each { |x| print x, "\n" }

Again, printing the one popped member.

Now all of that discusses what you showed, not what you meant.  Let's  
talk about that.

It seems to me you are trying to treat a Range as an Array.  The  
first thing to know there is that Ranges are already Enumerable:

irb(main):006:0> (1..10).each { |n| puts n }
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
=> 1..10

The other fact that may be of use to you is that we can turn a Range  
into an Array, as needed:

irb(main):007:0> ("a".."j").to_a
=> ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f", "g", "h", "i", "j"]

Hope that clears some things up.

James Edward Gray II