What are those pipe symbols for in Ruby?

Question

What are the pipe symbols for in Ruby?

I\'m learning Ruby and RoR, coming from a PHP and Java background, but I keep coming across code like this:

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Answer 1

This was very strange to me too at first, but I hope this explanation/walkthru helps you.

The documentation touches the subject, in a quite good way - if my answer doesn't help I am sure their guide will.

First, fire up the Interactive Ruby interpreter by typing irb in your shell and hitting Enter.

Type something like:

the_numbers = ['ett','tva','tre','fyra','fem'] # congratulations! You now know how to count to five in Swedish.

just so that we have an array to play with. Then we create the loop:

the_numbers.each do |linustorvalds|
    puts linustorvalds
end

It will output all the numbers, separated by newlines.

In other languages you'd have to write something like:

for (i = 0; i < the_numbers.length; i++) {
    linustorvalds = the_numbers[i]
    print linustorvalds;
}

The important things to note are that the |thing_inside_the_pipes| can be anything, as long as you are using it consistently. And understand that it is loops we are talking about, that was a thing I didn't get until later on.