Question

Here’s another “what’s the most elegant way to do X in Ruby” type of questions. Consider the response from a webservice with key:value pairs on each line of the return body, along the lines of

key1:val1
key2:val2
key3:val3

I want to create a Ruby hash with this data, {"key1" => "val1", ...}. Algorithmically I can git ‘er done with

hash = {}
body.lines.each do |line|
  key, val = line.split(':')
  hash[key] = val
end

but I’m guessing there’s a one-liner or two-liner that is even more elegant.

Answer 1

Here is my suggestion:

lines = [
  'key1:val1',
  'key2:val2',
  'key3:val3'
]

hash = Hash[lines.map {|it| it.split(':', 2)}]

Explanation

Hash[object] creates a new hash from the object. Where the object is one of:

• List of elements
• List of pairs
• Object that can be converted to hash