What is a elegant way in Ruby to tell if a variable is a Hash or an Array?

Question

To check what @some_var is, I am doing a

if @some_var.class.to_s == \'Hash\' 

I am sure there is a more elegant way to check if

Answer 1

In practice, you will often want to act differently depending on whether a variable is an Array or a Hash, not just mere tell. In this situation, an elegant idiom is the following:

case item
  when Array
   #do something
  when Hash
   #do something else
end

Note that you don't call the .class method on item.