4 ms·
Who would put a space inside the key name for an item in a hash? I'm confident it's commonly understood best practice (among many languages at that) to use an
by wfarr 16y ago
Who would put a space inside the key name for an item in a hash?
I'm confident it's commonly understood best practice (among many languages at that) to use an underscore (_) in lieu of spaces in such things.
I agree that the quirks themselves are odd, but the matter of using a key with a space in it really stood out.
- ark 16y agoIt's really common, actually. A symbol can actually have spaces in it: :"Some Text" is a perfectly valid symbol. ruby-1.9.2-p136 :001 > h = {:"Some Text" => 123} => {:"Some Text"=>123} ruby-1.9.2-p136 :002 > h[ "Some Text".to_sym ] => 123
- regularfry 16y agoYou can do it, but is it a good idea? What it implies to me is that at some point in your program, you're constructing symbols from arbitrary strings which aren't known ahead of time. This sounds like a recipe for disaster given that symbols aren't garbage collected.
- korny 16y agoWhen your key is a phrase, for instance? A hash of { phrase => count } is a pretty common data structure.