From: Michal Karas <largon@...>
Date: 2012-06-24T19:06:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Stripping symbol character from hash turned to array

On Sun, 24 Jun 2012 10:38:28 +0900
Emeka Patrick <lists@ruby-forum.com> wrote:

> If I want to keep it as a nested Array how can I go about stripping the
> ":" from what used to be the key. Please help and if possible, explain.

As other responders already said, ":" is only a notation for Symbol. It
has nothing to do with being a key in a Hash. In fact you can use
Strings as keys for your Hash and then Hash#to_a will produce directly
the result you want:

> { "fred" => 23, "joan" => 18, "pete" => 54 }.to_a
=> [["fred", 23], ["joan", 18], ["pete", 54]]

Although if you want to use Symbols as Hash keys and then having
Strings in resulting nested Array, you can use Hash#map method to do
the transformation:

> { :fred => 23, :joan => 18, :pete => 54 }.map { |key,value| [key.to_s, value] }
=> [["fred", 23], ["joan", 18], ["pete", 54]]

-- 
Michal Karas <largon@largon.net>