From: Pit Capitain <pit.capitain@...>
Date: 2009-02-17T03:43:35+09:00
Subject: Re: How to do this complicated logic in ruby

2009/2/16 Valentino Lun <sumwo@yahoo.com>:
> I cannot figure out the logic to doing this in ruby (even in other
> language). Can someone give me some hints on this? Thanks

While I agree on what the others have said, that you should create a
better data structure, here's a way to do what you wanted with your
array of hashes. But look at the other posts. It's easy to build good
data structures in Ruby.

  # create a key for the given record to be used in the pcat hash
  def pcat_key(record)
    [record["hosp"], record["loc"], record["psec"]]
  end

  # build hash with valid pcat values
  pcat = {}
  my_array.each do |record|
    next unless record["server"] == record["hosp"]
    pcat[pcat_key(record)] = record["pcat"]
  end

  # look for invalid records
  my_array.each do |record|
    next if record["pcat"] == pcat[pcat_key(record)]
    # do something with the invalid record
    p record
  end

Regards,
Pit