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Armaan Dhanji
4,664 PointsConfusion regarding unusual result from equal? in Ruby for object comparison
I'm totally confused about why the answer i'm getting for this equality check is false, when I thought the two variable objects I created are in the same memory location? (Doesn't ruby have an optimization where if the string values are the same, a new object is not created but rather, a pointer to the first one is made?).
x = "hello" y = "hello"
x.equal?(y) -> false Shouldn't it return true? I know that if I do an object_id check, they will have different id's, but doesn't different id's mean different memory addresses. TLDR; when I made two variables with the same values for strings, and I do the equal? check, shouldn't it return true? (because equal? checks for if they are the same object, and I thought ruby does not create a new object for strings if the value of the string is one which has already been created previously).
1 Answer
John O.
4,680 PointsWhen you make 2 separate variable declarations:
x = "hello"
y = "hello"
Ruby stores the same string in 2 distinct memory locations
If you want to reference the same exact string (in memory) with 2 variables:
a = b = "my_string"
then
a.equal?(b)
will return true