Question

I’m building a tree of html elements, class names and their counts.

How would I structure this code with the proper syntax?

$html = {

    :p => [
        { 'quote' => 10 },
        { 'important' => 4 }
    ],
    :h2 =>  [
        { 'title' => 33 },
        { 'subtitle' => 15 }
    ]

}

I’m confused by the nested hash syntax. Thanks for the help setting me straight.

Answer 1

After defining the HTML element you don’t assign another hash, but a list and from your question title I guess you want to nest another hash directly. Thus you do not start with a square bracket, but with another curly brace:

$html = {
    :p => { 'quote' => 10, 'important' => 4 },
    :h2 =>  { 'title' => 33, 'subtitle' => 15 }
}

#Example
puts $html[:p]['quote']

Which will print:

10

Take a look at the constructor documentation of Hash, there are different ways to initialize hashes, maybe you find a more intuitive one.