Ruby Hashes Extra Credit. Too hard?

Congrats, Andrew :). I can't see anything wrong with your code, but then again, I'm not a real developer yet :).

Mind telling me why you used an instance variable? I thought you only use that when you initialize something in a class. Why did you use it in a basic method rather then a regular variable to set the array too?

Alphonse Cuccurullo it's to do with Scope, as I alluded to in the answer. However, off the top of my head, I'm not exactly sure why. I'm sure I could find out with some googling, but I suggest you do that yourself and tell me if you're still stumped and why and I'll help you out.

Still stumped

Alphonse Cuccurullo I can't help you unless you tell me what you've done to try to 'unstump' yourself and what exactly it is that you don't understand.

I just wanna know the purpose behing you using the @newhash rather then just hash = []. That's all really.

I just wanna know the purpose behing you using the @newhash rather then just hash = []. That's all really.

Alphonse Cuccurullo, again, it's to do with Scope, as I alluded to in the answer. However, off the top of my head, I'm not exactly sure why. I'm sure I could find out with some googling, but I suggest you do that yourself and tell me if you're still stumped and why and I'll help you out.

I dont know what you mean by scope bro. More specific detail's would be fantastic.

Alphonse Cuccurullo. Dude, you really need to get into the habit of googling so you can get good at it. If/when you become professional, you still have to do that all the time. Being good at googling to learn stuff is just as important a skill as knowing how to use git, for example. No joke.

This might sound harsh, but it's for your own good. You don't know what Scope means, so google "ruby scope".

Alphonse Cuccurullo I've just realised that this solution isn't recursive anyway.

I've gone to the trouble of creating some homework for you that I think will be a very useful exercise for you, for a number of reasons.

I've created a repo with a non-recursive solution. The solution is verified using a test I created with rspec.

Follow the instructions in the Readme to clone the repo to your laptop and get to the point where you can run rspec to execute the test. That's the first task.

Second is to rewrite the convert method so it's recursive. Google recursive to find out what that means.

Here's the repo: https://github.com/Yorkshireman/string_keys_to_syms

Whenever you make a change to the convert method, you can check if it works properly by just running rspec. You simply rewrite the method so it's recursive - you'll know it's correct if the test still passes.

Lol thanks for the help man and tolerating me as well greatly appreciate it. Had no idea there were that many different types of variable's. I am fairly new at coding i think i just gotta take one thing at a time to get it crammed into my mind. Coding is stressful especially when you gotta keep a eye on all the pieces of syntax that synergize with eachother.

It looks like I'll have to come back to this after I've gone through the Method module - this is what I mean - this task seems out of sync with the tutorials. I know I'm complaining here, but I'm not one for complaining for the sake of it (I do believe in the 'stop whining and get on with it' approach) - I'm just feeding back that the extra credit things could be better constructed.

I'll get on with getting on with it now ;-) Thanks for the advice, it will help a lot and I'll post up my code here once I've solved the problem.

I don't understand why I should use .map instead of .each_key? In my code below, using either gives the same result.

Like I said, .map is something I know and something I would use, there are probably more ways to do it :). Although, I'm not sure how to use each_key to return the whole hash. I only tried this with map and it worked for me.

Ok, I solved this problem, with some experimentation, BUT I REALLY NEED SOMEONE TO EXPLAIN WHY.

So, it was solved simply by using key = key.to_sym instead of just key.to_sym

@myhash = {"Name"=>"Andy", "Sex"=>"Male", "Status"=>"Awesome"}

def convert
    @myhash.each_key do |key| 
        key = key.to_sym
        print key.class
    end
end

convert

This returns SymbolSymbolSymbol

So, in Ruby, there are two kinds of methods. Some methods just do stuff, return the result, but don't modify the object they are used on (they just return the new value in the line they are called, and in the next line, the object is back to its original form) and in many cases, these same methods have a parallel method which ends with the ! symbol ("unsafe methods") and such methods permanently change the object it was used on. The method you used here:

key.to_sym

is a "safe" method, which means it does not modify the key object - it just returns the key as symbol in this line, and after this line the key is back to its original form (String). But if you assign this returned value to the key variable (key = key.to_sym), it will be changed permanently, so in the next line, you no longer have a string - you have a symbol and so Symbol class is returned. Hope this helps. (not sure if there's an unsafe version of to_sym, I just mentioned "unsafe" methods as a general tip I learned at some point ;) ).

Thanks Maciej. It makes sense.

What I'm trying to work out now, is how to PERMANENTLY alter the keys i.e. change them into symbols inside the method (like I have), but when running 'puts "Name".class' for example, afterwards, outside the method, I want it to return 'Symbol'.

Any hints?

I would suggest simply building a completely new hash, at each iteration putting a modified key and value from the original hash, and then returning that new hash instead of making a permanent change to the original one.

Yep, I had a similar idea. Thanks for the confirmation. My head hurts, but I'll be the happiest man alive when I finally solve this thing.