Question

I know of the ||= operator, but don’t think it’ll help me here…trying to create an array that counts the number of “types” among an array of objects.

array.each do |c|
  newarray[c.type] = newarray[c.type] ? newarray[c.type]+1 ? 0
end

Is there a more graceful way to do this?

Answer 1

types = Hash.new(-1) # It feels like this should be 0, but to be
                     # equivalent to your example it needs to be -1
array.each do |c|
  types[c.type] += 1
end