Question

I want to be able to this with a symbol

variable1 = :hello
variable2 = variable1.dup

but the dup method doesn’t work on symbols. Is there an equivalent method for symbols?

Answer 1

You can’t, only one instance of a given symbol ever exists. It’s just as impossible as trying to do 42.dup.

You can see that you always get the same object for a symbol with this simple snippet:

Array.new(1000) { :foo.object_id }.uniq.size  #=> 1

versus a string (which you can dup):

Array.new(1000) { 'foo'.object_id }.uniq.size  #=> 1000