Question

How would I create three empty hashes with a single line of code?

I know that a = b = c = Hash.new won’t work, since that’ll create three references to the same Hash object.

a,b,c = Hash.new will assign the Hash to a, but b and c remain nil.

I know I could do a, b, c = Hash.new, Hash.new, Hash.new, but that doesn’t look very DRY.

Answer 1

As I posted as a comment, I think a, b, c = {}, {}, {} is the best way, because it’s short, and easy to read. If you really want to do it in a more complicated way, something like this will work:

>> a, b, c = Array.new(3) { Hash.new } #=> [{}, {}, {}]
>> a #=> {}
>> b #=> {}
>> c #=> {}