Question

I am populating an array of hashes from the database and what I get in the end looks like:

[{:element1 => "value1", :element2 => "value2"}, {:element1 => "value3", :element2 => "value4"}]

What I want to do now is write the value of element2 if element1 has value1. I tried doing

puts my_array[my_array.index(:element1 => "value1")].element2

but that only gives me an error saying:

no implicit conversion from nil to integer

What I am using now is

puts my_array.find_by_element1("value1").element2

but that queries the database every time and I would like to avoid that if possible since I already have all the values.

Edit: my Ruby version is 1.8.7

Answer 1

You can’t use index for partial matches. Try using detect.

my_array.detect { |el| el[:element1] == "value1" }[:element2]
=> "value2"