Question

I have a string like this in Ruby

word=0 id=891efc9a-2210-4beb-a19a-5e86b2f8a49f

How can I get both the word and id values from that string?

Answer 1

Here’s an approach that will work – split up the target string into tokens by whitespace and equals-sign characters (tokens=str.split(/[= ]/)) and create a Hash out of them (Hash[*tokens]). The result is a Hash whose keys are the token before the equals sign and the values are the ones after it:

s = 'word=0 id=891efc9a-2210-4beb-a19a-5e86b2f8a49f'
h = Hash[*s.split(/[= ]/)]
h # => {"word"=>"0", "id"=>"891efc9a-2210-4beb-a19a-5e86b2f8a49f"}
h['word'] # => "0"
h['id'] # => "891efc9a-2210-4beb-a19a-5e86b2f8a49f"

Of course, it will break if your “keys” or “values” contain equal signs or spaces but it works for your example.