Question

I have a array of my object Country which has the attributes “code” and “name”

The array could have a country in it more than once so I want to distinct the array.

This is my countries class

class Country
  include Mongoid::Fields::Serializable
  attr_accessor :name, :code

  FILTERS = ["Afghanistan","Brunei","Iran", "Kuwait", "Libya", "Saudi Arabia", "Sudan", "Yemen", "Britain (UK)", "Antarctica", "Bonaire Sint Eustatius & Saba", "British Indian Ocean Territory", "Cocos (Keeling) Islands", "St Barthelemy", "St Martin (French part)", "Svalbard & Jan Mayen","Vatican City"]

  EXTRAS = {
    'eng' => 'England',
    'wal' => 'Wales',
    'sco' => 'Scotland',
    'nlr' => 'Northern Ireland'
    }

  def initialize(name, code)
    @name = name
    @code = code
  end

  def deserialize(object)
    return nil unless object
    Country.new(object['name'], object['code'])
  end

  def serialize(country)
    {:name => country.name, :code => country.code}
  end

  def self.all
    add_extras(filter(TZInfo::Country.all.map{|country| to_country country})).sort! {|c1, c2| c1.name <=> c2.name}
  end

  def self.get(code)
    begin
      to_country TZInfo::Country.get(code)
    rescue TZInfo::InvalidCountryCode => e
      'InvalidCountryCode' unless EXTRAS.has_key? code
      Country.new EXTRAS[code], code
    end
  end

  def self.get_by_name(name)
    all.select {|country| country.name.downcase == name.downcase}.first
  end

  def self.filter(countries)
    countries.reject {|country| FILTERS.include?(country.name)}
  end

  def self.add_extras(countries)
    countries + EXTRAS.map{|k,v| Country.new v, k}
  end

  private
  def self.to_country(country)
    Country.new country.name, country.code
  end
end

and my request for the array which is called from another class

  def countries_ive_drunk
    (had_drinks.map {|drink| drink.beer.country }).uniq
  end

If I throw the array I can see the structure is:

[
#<Country:0x5e3b4c8 @name="Belarus", @code="BY">, 
#<Country:0x5e396e0 @name="Britain (UK)", @code="GB">, 
#<Country:0x5e3f350 @name="Czech Republic", @code="CZ">, 
#<Country:0x5e3d730 @name="Germany", @code="DE">, 
#<Country:0x5e43778 @name="United States", @code="US">, 
#<Country:0x5e42398 @name="England", @code="eng">, 
#<Country:0x5e40f70 @name="Aaland Islands", @code="AX">, 
#<Country:0x5e47978 @name="England", @code="eng">, 
#<Country:0x5e46358 @name="Portugal", @code="PT">, 
#<Country:0x5e44d38 @name="Georgia", @code="GE">, 
#<Country:0x5e4b668 @name="Germany", @code="DE">, 
#<Country:0x5e4a2a0 @name="Anguilla", @code="AI">, 
#<Country:0x5e48c98 @name="Anguilla", @code="AI">
]

This is the same, whether or not I do .uniq and you can see there is two “Anguilla”

Answer 1

Objects in array are considered duplicate by Array#uniq if their #hash values are duplicate, which is not the case in this code. You need to use different approach to do what intended, like this:

def countries_ive_drunk
  had_drinks.map {|drink| drink.beer.country.code }
    .uniq
    .map { |code| Country.get code}
end