What is the “right” way to iterate through an array in Ruby?

Question

PHP, for all its warts, is pretty good on this count. There\'s no difference between an array and a hash (maybe I\'m naive, but this seems obviously right to me), and to ite

Answer 1

If you use the enumerable mixin (as Rails does) you can do something similar to the php snippet listed. Just use the each_slice method and flatten the hash.

require 'enumerator' 

['a',1,'b',2].to_a.flatten.each_slice(2) {|x,y| puts "#{x} => #{y}" }

# is equivalent to...

{'a'=>1,'b'=>2}.to_a.flatten.each_slice(2) {|x,y| puts "#{x} => #{y}" }

Less monkey-patching required.

However, this does cause problems when you have a recursive array or a hash with array values. In ruby 1.9 this problem is solved with a parameter to the flatten method that specifies how deep to recurse.

# Ruby 1.8
[1,2,[1,2,3]].flatten
=> [1,2,1,2,3]

# Ruby 1.9
[1,2,[1,2,3]].flatten(0)
=> [1,2,[1,2,3]]

As for the question of whether this is a code smell, I'm not sure. Usually when I have to bend over backwards to iterate over something I step back and realize I'm attacking the problem wrong.