Best way to convert strings to symbols in hash

Question

What\'s the (fastest/cleanest/straightforward) way to convert all keys in a hash from strings to symbols in Ruby?

This would be handy when parsing YAML.

Answer 1

In case the reason you need to do this is because your data originally came from JSON, you could skip any of this parsing by just passing in the :symbolize_names option upon ingesting JSON.

No Rails required and works with Ruby >1.9

JSON.parse(my_json, :symbolize_names => true)