You’ll be hard pressed to escape working with hashes in Ruby, but don’t make using them a painful experience. Here are some helpful tips that I’ve collected that I would like to share.

slice over a helper method

I see this more often then I care to remember:

  def convert(hash)
    {
      key: hash[:key],
      key2: hash[:key2]
    }
  end

Hash has this built in and performs the same as above.

hash.slice(:key, :key2)

churning values out into an array

  [hash[:key], hash[:key2], hash[:key3]]

values_at will perform this with a little less mess.

  hash.keys(:key, :key2, :key3)

merge can be a big help

  def convert(hash)
    {
      somekey: hash[:somekey],
      another: another
    }
  end

Instead, maybe this:

  hash.slice(:somekey).merge(another: another)