Sorting a hash in Ruby by its value first then its key

Question

I am trying to sort a document based on the number of times the word appears then alphabetically by the words so when it is outputted it will look something like this.

Answer 1

When you use the sort method on a hash, you receive two element arrays in your comparison block, with which you can do comparisons in one pass.

hsh = { 'the' => '6', 'we' => '6', 'those' => '5', 'have' => '3'}
ary = hsh.sort do |a,b|
  # a and b are two element arrays in the format [key,value]
  value_comparison = a.last <=> b.last
  if value_comparison.zero?
    # compare keys if values are equal
    a.first <=> b.first
  else
    value_comparison
  end
end
# => [['have',3],['those',5],['the',6],['we',6]]

Note that the result is an array of arrays because hashes do not have intrinsic order in ruby