How to remove duplicates in a hash in Ruby on Rails?

Question

I have a hash like so:

[
  {
    :lname => \"Brown\",
    :email => \"james@intuit.com\",
    :fname => \"James\"
  },
  {
    :lname => nil,
            


        

Answer 1

If you're putting this directly into the database, just use validates_uniqueness_of :email in your model. See the documentation for this.

If you need to remove them from the actual hash before being used then do:

emails = []  # This is a temporary array, not your results. The results are still in my_array
my_array.delete_if do |item|
  if emails.include? item[:email]
    true
  else
    emails << item[:email]
    false
  end
end

UPDATE:

This will merge the contents of duplicate entries

merged_list = {}
my_array.each do |item|
  if merged_list.has_key? item[:email]
    merged_list[item.email].merge! item
  else
    merged_list[item.email] = item
  end
end
my_array = merged_list.collect { |k, v| v }