Question

I am new to Ruby, and I am having some problems with hashes.

I have XML returned from the YouTube API that I converted into a hash. Here is the hash returned by Hash.from_xml(): http://pastebin.com/9xxE6iXU

I am trying to grab specific elements from the hash for each result, such as the title, link, author, etc. Whenever I try to loop through the hash or grab a specific element, I receive a “can’t convert String into Integer” error.

Here is the code I am using for the loop:

@data["feed"]["entry"]["title"].each do  |key, value|
    "<p>"+key+" "+value+"</p>"
end

I have also tried grabbing specific elements, such as @data[“feed”][“entry”][“title”][0].

How do I loop through the hash and grab specific elements out?

Answer 1

That’s happening because @data["feed"]["entry"] is array of hashes:

puts @data["feed"]["entry"].class  # => Array

Each element-hash inside this array has “id”, “category”, “title” etc. values.

For grabbing each title try to use following snippet:

@data["feed"]["entry"].each do |entry|
  puts entry["title"]
end
# => "TABE test adult basic education"
     "WhatCollegesHopeYouWon'tFindOutAboutACTSATTestPrep..."
     ....