From: "Peña, Botp" <botp@...>
Date: 2007-07-12T13:24:22+09:00
Subject: Re: Returning part of a hash

From: Nobuyoshi Nakada [mailto:nobu@ruby-lang.org] 
# Hash#slice doesn't exist but Hash#select in recent 1.9 works
# similarly.
# 
#   keys = %w"key2 key5 key7"
#   newhash = hash.select {|k,v| keys.include?(k)}

i'm glad v1.9 hash#select returns hash.
how about hash#shift?

thank you for the update 
-botp