Question

As of Ruby 1.9, hashes retain insertion order which is very cool. I want to know the best way to access the last key–value pair.

I’ve written some code which does this:

hash.values.last

This works and is very easy to comprehend, but perhaps it’s possible to access the last value directly, rather that via an intermediary (the array of values). Is it?

Answer 1

Nothing built in, no. But you could monkey-patch one if you were so inclined (not usually recommended, of course):

class Hash
  def last_value
    values.last
  end
end

And then:

hash.last_value