Ruby 1.9 regex as a hash key

Question

I am trying this example myhash = {/(\\d+)/ => \"hello\"} with ruby 1.9.2p136 (2010-12-25) [i386-mingw32].
It doesn\'t work as exp

Answer 1

There is now a gem called Hashie that provides this feature (and much more): https://github.com/intridea/hashie#rash

It provides a data structure called Rash (short for regex-hash) that can be used like this

myhash = {/(\d+)/ => "hello"}
rash = Hashie::Rash.new(myhash)

>> rash["2222"]
=> "hello"

It really tries to match the key against the regexes so numeric keys won't work unless you convert them to string, which you can do easily by inheriting Rash into your own class