Building Hash by grouping array of objects based on a property of the items

Question

I\'m wondering if there is a more canonical way to do this in ruby 1.9

I have an array with a bunch of objects and I want to group them into a Hash using a property of e

Answer 1

Ruby has anticipated your need, and has got you covered with Enumerable#group_by:

irb(main):001:0> aers = %w(a b c d ab bc de abc)
#=> ["a", "b", "c", "d", "ab", "bc", "de", "abc"]

irb(main):002:0> aers.group_by{ |s| s.size }
#=> {1=>["a", "b", "c", "d"], 2=>["ab", "bc", "de"], 3=>["abc"]}

In Ruby 1.9, you can make this even shorter with:

irb(main):003:0> aers.group_by(&:size)
#=> {1=>["a", "b", "c", "d"], 2=>["ab", "bc", "de"], 3=>["abc"]}