Question

Apart from making it sightly more concise for defining hashes with symbols as keys, are there any other benefits of writing a hash as:

{key1: "value1", key2: "value2"} instead of {:key1 => "value1", :key2 => "value2"}?

Also, what is the convention when you have a mix of strings and symbols as hash keys?

Do you write it as {"key1" => "value1", key2: "value2"} or keep the style consistant as {"key1" => "value1", :key => "value2"}

Answer 1

It just looks nicer–it’s syntactic sugar; it ends up being the same thing.

When mixing keys (ew, why would you do that?) I use the old hash-rocket syntax for the entire hash.

With symbol values I also use the old hash-rocket syntax for the entire hash–this looks icky:

{ ohai: :kthxbye }

I don’t like mixing the two styles in the same hash–I think it’s confusing.

This is all based on personal preference, though.