How to create a symbol from a string that has whitespaces?

Question

I am creating a Ruby hash for movie names storage.

When the hash's keys are strings that contains whitespaces, it works just fine.

As in:

movies = {"Avatar" => 5, "Lord of the rings" => 4, "Godfather" => 4}

Now I am trying to replace the use of strings with symbols:

movies = {Avatar: 5, Lord of the rings: 4, Godfather: 4}

Obviously that doesn't work.

How does Ruby handle whitespaces in symbol naming?

Answer 1

Try by yourself

"Lord of the rings".to_sym
#=> :"Lord of the rings"

Answer 2

I'm not sure why you want to use symbols when you want spaces in the key values, but you can do that. You just can't do it using the <symbol>: <value> syntax...

{:Avatar => 5, :"Lord of the rings" => 4, :Godfather => 4}

Answer 3

To make a symbol with spaces, enter a colon followed by a quoted String. For your example, you would enter:

movies = {:Avatar => 5, :'Lord of the rings' => 4, :Godfather => 4}

Answer 4

Late to the party, but another way to get around this is to do the following:

movies = Hash.new

movies["the little mermaid".to_sym] = 4