Question

How do I swap keys and values in a Hash?

I have the following Hash:

{:a=>:one, :b=>:two, :c=>:three}

that I want to transform into:

{:one=>:a, :two=>:b, :three=>:c}

Using map seems rather tedious. Is there a shorter solution?

Answer 1

Ruby has a helper method for Hash that lets you treat a Hash as if it was inverted (in essence, by letting you access keys through values):

{a: 1, b: 2, c: 3}.key(1)
=> :a

If you want to keep the inverted hash, then Hash#invert should work for most situations:

{a: 1, b: 2, c: 3}.invert
=> {1=>:a, 2=>:b, 3=>:c}

BUT…

If you have duplicate values, invert will discard all but the last occurrence of your values (because it will keep replacing new value for that key during iteration). Likewise, key will only return the first match:

{a: 1, b: 2, c: 2}.key(2)
=> :b

{a: 1, b: 2, c: 2}.invert
=> {1=>:a, 2=>:c}

So, if your values are unique you can use Hash#invert. If not, then you can keep all the values as an array, like this:

class Hash
  # like invert but not lossy
  # {"one"=>1,"two"=>2, "1"=>1, "2"=>2}.inverse => {1=>["one", "1"], 2=>["two", "2"]} 
  def safe_invert
    each_with_object({}) do |(key,value),out| 
      out[value] ||= []
      out[value] << key
    end
  end
end

Note: This code with tests is now on GitHub.

Or:

class Hash
  def safe_invert
    self.each_with_object({}){|(k,v),o|(o[v]||=[])<<k}
  end
end