a = {
1 => ["walmart", "walmart.com", 300.0],
2 => ["amazon", "amazon.com", 350.0],
...
}
How do I find the element with lowest value of the float value in its array?
min_by is available as a method from the Enumerable module.
It gets the array of all values in the Hash, and then picks the minimum value based on the last element of each array.
a.values.min_by(&:last)
Another useful method is sort_by from the Enumerable module as well. It will arrange your hash from ascending order. Then chain the method with first to grab the lowest value.
a.sort_by { |key, value| value }.first
See the min_by solution in the answer below. My original answer to this question was way less efficient, as pointed out in the comment.
Related
I'm trying to get the index of a key in a hash.
I know how to do this in an array:
arr = ['Done', 13, 0.4, true]
a = arr.index('Done')
puts a
Is there a method or some sort of way to do this something like this with a key in a hash? Thanks!
Hashes aren't usually treated as ordered structures, they simply have a list of keys and values corresponding to those keys.
It's true that in Ruby hashes are technically ordered, but there's very rarely an actual use case for treating them as such.
If what you want to do is find the key corresponding to a value in a hash, you can simply use the Hash#key method:
hash = { a: 1, b: 2 }
hash.key(1) # => :a
I suppose you could use hash.keys.index(hash.key(1)) to get 0 since it's the first value, but again, I wouldn't advise doing this because it's not typical use of the data structure
There are at least a couple ways you can get this information, the 2 that come to mind are Enumerable's find_index method to pass each element to a block and check for your key:
hash.find_index { |key, _| key == 'Done' }
or you could get all the keys from your hash as an array and then look up the index as you've been doing:
hash.keys.index('Done')
One of the exercises in this tutorial is:
Exploit the fact that map always returns an array: write a method hash_keys that accepts a hash and maps over it to return all the keys in a linear Array.
The solution is:
def hash_keys(hash)
hash.map { |pair| pair.first }
end
However, I'm having trouble understanding why the above works. For example, I wrote a solution as follows that also works:
def hash_keys(hash)
# Initialize a new array
result = Array.new
# Cycle through each element of the hash and push each key on to our array
hash.map { |x,y| result.push(x) }
# Return the array
result
end
I can understand why my method works, but I don't understand their proposed solution. For example, they are not even creating an Array object. They are not returning anything. It seems they are just listing the first element in each key/value element array.
I think you misunderstood the point of map. It doesn't just iterate over the given collection (that's what each is for) - it creates an array where each element is the result of calling the block with the corresponding element of the original collection.
Your solution could (and should) just as well be written using each instead of map as you aren't really making use of what map does - you're only making use of the fact that it invokes its block once for each element in the given collection.
When map is applied to a hash, the hash is converted to an array. That is why explicit conversion into an array is not necessary. And map returns an array by replacing each item of the original array with the result of evaluating the block. Each time the block is evaluated, it will be given an array that is a pair of a key and its value. first applies to this pair and returns the key. map returns an array of these keys.
map turns an Enumerable object into an Array. It's what it does. The block describes, in terms of each element in the receiver, what the corresponding element in the resulting array should be.
So, a simpler example is map on an Array:
[1,2,3,4].map {|n| n*2}
# => [2,4,6,8]
That is - from [1,2,3,4], generate a new Array, where each element is twice the equivalent entry in [1,2,3,4].
Half of your answer is right in the question: "Exploit the fact that map always returns an array." You don't need to explicitly create an array because map does that for you.
As far as returning it, you already seem to know that the last line of a ruby method is its return value. In the tutorial's solution, since the hash creates an array at the last (and only line), the array is returned from the method.
Can somebody explain to me what the below code is doing. before and after are hashes.
def differences(before, after)
before.diff(after).keys.sort.inject([]) do |diffs, k|
diff = { :attribute => k, :before => before[k], :after => after[k] }
diffs << diff; diffs
end
end
It is from the papertrail differ gem.
It's dense code, no question. So, as you say before and after are hash(-like?) objects that are handed into the method as parameters. Calling before.diff(after) returns another hash, which then immediately has .keys called on it. That returns all the keys in the hash that diff returned. The keys are returned as an array, which is then immediately sorted.
Then we get to the most complex/dense bit. Using inject on that sorted array of keys, the method builds up an array (called diffs inside the inject block) which will be the return value of the inject method.
That array is made up of records of differences. Each record is a hash - built up by taking one key from the sorted array of keys from the before.diff(after) return value. These hashes store the attribute that's being diffed, what it looked like in the before hash and what it looks like in the after hash.
So, in a nutshell, the method gets a bunch of differences between two hashes and collects them up in an array of hashes. That array of hashes is the final return value of the method.
Note: inject can be, and often is, much, much simpler than this. Usually it's used to simply reduce a collection of values to one result, by applying one operation over and over again and storing the results in an accumlator. You may know inject as reduce from other languages; reduce is an alias for inject in Ruby. Here's a much simpler example of inject:
[1,2,3,4].inject(0) do |sum, number|
sum + number
end
# => 10
0 is the accumulator - the initial value. In the pair |sum, number|, sum will be the accumulator and number will be each number in the array, one after the other. What inject does is add 1 to 0, store the result in sum for the next round, add 2 to sum, store the result in sum again and so on. The single final value of the accumulator sum will be the return value. Here 10. The added complexity in your example is that the accumulator is different in kind from the values inside the block. That's less common, but not bad or unidiomatic. (Edit: Andrew Marshall makes the good point that maybe it is bad. See his comment on the original question. And #tokland points out that the inject here is just a very over-complex alternative for map. It is bad.) See the article I linked to in the comments to your question for more examples of inject.
Edit: As #tokland points out in a few comments, the code seems to need just a straightforward map. It would read much easier then.
def differences(before, after)
before.diff(after).keys.sort.map do |k|
{ :attribute => k, :before => before[k], :after => after[k] }
end
end
I was too focused on explaining what the code was doing. I didn't even think of how to simplify it.
It finds the entries in before and after that differ according to the underlying objects, then builds up a list of those differences in a more convenient format.
before.diff(after) finds the entries that differ.
keys.sort gives you the keys (of the map of differences) in sorted order
inject([]) is like map, but starts with diffs initialized to an empty array.
The block creates a diff line (a hash) for each of these differences, and then appends it to diffs.
There is probably a very simple answer to this question, but I can't for the life of me figure it out at the moment. If I have a ruby array of a certain type of objects, and they all have a particular field, how do I find the element of the array the has the largest value for that field?
array.max_by do |element|
element.field
end
Or:
array.max_by(&:field)
Does this help?
my_array.max {|a,b| a.attr <=> b.attr }
(I assume that your field has name attr)
You can also sort the array and then get max, min, second largest value etc.
array = array.sort_by {|k,v| v}.reverse
puts hash[0]["key"]
I have an array which for arguments sake looks something like this:
a = [[1,100], [2,200], [3,300], [2,300]]
Of those four sub-arrays, I would like to merge any where the first element is a duplicate. So in the example above I would like to merge the 2nd and the 4th sub-arrays. However, the caveat is that where the second element in the matching sub-arrays is different, I would like to maintain the higher value.
So, I would like to see this result:
a = [[1,100], [3,300], [2,300]]
This little conundrum is a little above my Ruby skills so am turning to the community for help. Any guidance with how to tackle this is much appreciated.
Thanks
# Get a hash that maps the first entry of each subarray to the subarray
# requires 1.8.7+ or active_support (or facets, I think)
hash = a.group_by { |first, second| first }
# Take each entry in the hash and select the biggest entry for each unique key
hash.map {|k,v| v.max }