Ruby Symbol

ruby-talk
1

I have been looking into what exactly a Ruby symbol is and have gotten
some decent info on how they work. I have only one question, how are
they used in functions like in Rails? I see Rails function like:

func("string", :symbol => "string")

How is the combination of the symbol and the string being used inside
the function? Is this some kind of convention?

I don't want to start another war on what symbols are for, I just want a
little clarification on how they are used in the context I provided
above. Thanks.

- Josh

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2

AFAIK you are passing a string and a Hash as an argument to the above
method.
So implementation would look like:

def func(text,option_hash)
  # text contains the string
  # option_hash is the hash as usual.
  p option_hash[:symbol] #=> "string"
end

Using symbols as Hash keys is convention for sure.

···

On Wed, 2007-01-24 at 05:03 +0900, AliasX Neo wrote:

I have been looking into what exactly a Ruby symbol is and have gotten
some decent info on how they work. I have only one question, how are
they used in functions like in Rails? I see Rails function like:

func("string", :symbol => "string")

How is the combination of the symbol and the string being used inside
the function? Is this some kind of convention?

I don't want to start another war on what symbols are for, I just want a
little clarification on how they are used in the context I provided
above. Thanks.