Ruby Symbols vs Strings in Hashes

Question

I have this hash:

{
  \"title\"=>\"Navy to place breath-test machines on all its ships\", 
  \"url\"=>\"http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=a6         


        

Answer 1

Since a symbol is not the same as a string:

:url == 'url' #=> false

As hash keys they would be different. Perhaps you have seen this behavior in Rails? Ruby on Rails uses HashWithIndifferentAccess which maps everything to a String internally, so you can do this:

h = HashWithIndifferentAccess.new
h['url'] = 'http://www.google.com/'
h[:url] #=> 'http://www.google.com/'