How to create a symbol from a string that has whitespaces?

Question

I am creating a Ruby hash for movie names storage.

When the hash\'s keys are strings that contains whitespaces, it works just fine.

As in:

movies =

Answer 1

Late to the party, but another way to get around this is to do the following:

movies = Hash.new

movies["the little mermaid".to_sym] = 4