Ruby - Using Hashes as Arrays

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Introduction

The keys and values methods of Hash each return an array.

So you can use various Array methods to manipulate them.

Here are a few simple examples:

Demo

h1 = {'key1'=>'val1', 'key2'=>'val2', 'key3'=>'val3', 'key4'=>'val4'} 
h2 = {'key1'=>'val1', 'KEY_TWO'=>'val2', 'key3'=>'VALUE_3', 'key4'=>'val4'} 

p( h1.keys & h2.keys )                                 # set intersection (keys) 
#=> ["key1", "key3", "key4"] 
#   w  w  w  .  j  a v  a  2  s.  co  m
p( h1.values & h2.values )                             # set intersection (values) 
#=> ["val1", "val2", "val4"]     

p( h1.keys+h2.keys )                                   # concatenation 
#=> [ "key1", "key2", "key3", "key4", "key1", "key3", "key4", "KEY_TWO"] 

p( h1.values-h2.values )                               # difference 
#=> ["val3"] 

p( (h1.keys << h2.keys)  )                             # append 
#=> ["key1", "key2", "key3", "key4", ["key1", "key3", "key4", "KEY_TWO"]] 

p( (h1.keys << h2.keys).flatten.reverse  )             # 'un-nest' arrays and reverse 
#=> ["KEY_TWO", "key4", "key3", "key1", "key4", "key3", "key2", "key1"]

Result

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