Question

I’d like to “explode” an array in Ruby in order to do a fast variable assignment i.e.

a, b = ['first_var', 'second_var']

Is this possible? I’ve looked through the array docs and can’t find anything that seems to offer this but it seems Rubyish…

Answer 1

This works as you would expect. Note that you can use * to slurp up extra right hand side elements, whereas extra elements on the left hand side will be set to nil:

>> range = *1..10 #=> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
>> a, b = range #=> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
>> [a, b] #=> [1, 2]
>> a, *b = range #=> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
>> b #=> [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
>> a, b, c = 1,2 #=> [1, 2]
>> c #=> nil