Question

I’m playing around with nested hashes and I’m trying to figure out how to fetch multiple keys when my hash is a nested one:

imahash = { :id => { :name => "Alma", :email => "[e-mail]" },
            :stats => { :gender => "Female" }, 
            :location => { :city => "Freeport", :state => "Maine" } 
          }

I know how to retrieve the nested value, and typing in the hash name will dump all the keys and values. But what I want to do is to fetch specific keys, such as :name and :gender only. Or :name and :city only.

Is this possible? Because from what I’ve found, it seems that you can only retrieve hash values for one key at a time or for all the keys at once.

My desired output would be something like:

=> { :id => { :name => "Alma" }, :location => { :city => "Freeport" } }

Answer 1

I presume you want to grab the values out in a tuple? You can make an array that contains whatever collection of values you want.

Try the following for name and city:

[imahash[:id][:name], imahash[:location][:city]]
=> ["Alma", "Freeport"]