Question

I have an array of Musical Tracks and in this array the same song can show up multiple times due to being released on multiple albums. I am trying to remove them from the array so that only true uniques show up in the list.

The Hash looks something like this:

"tracks" => [
    [0] {
        "id" => 1,
        "Title" => "Intergalactic",
        "ArtistName" => "Beastie Boys"
    },
    [1] {
        "id" => 2,
        "Title" => "Intergalactic",
        "ArtistName" => "Beastie Boys"
    }
]

I am needing a way to remove the duplicates based on the Title key. Anyway of doing this?

Answer 1

If you are using ActiveSupport, you can use uniq_by, like so :

tracks.uniq_by {|track| track["title"]}

If not, then you can easily implement it yourself. See this.

# File activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/array/uniq_by.rb, line 6
  def uniq_by
    hash, array = {}, []
    each { |i| hash[yield(i)] ||= (array << i) }
    array
  end