Question

In Ruby, given an array-of-arrays representing a 2D grid of numbers, how would you extract a specific sub-2D array?

a = [[0, 3, 1, 5, 5],
     [4, 6, 8, 3, 5],
     [7, 1, 4, 0, 8],
     [0, 8, 8, 7, 4],
     [7, 2, 4, 5, 4]]

require 'pp'
pp sub_array(a,1..4,2..4)
#=> [[8, 3, 5],
#=>  [4, 0, 8],
#=>  [8, 7, 4],
#=>  [4, 5, 4]]

This is ‘easy’ to do using the Matrix library:

m = Matrix[*a]
p m.minor(1..4,2..4).to_a
#=> [[8, 3, 5], [4, 0, 8], [8, 7, 4], [4, 5, 4]]

However, I feel certain that there’s an elegant way to do this without using the Matrix, perhaps involving zip or transpose 🙂

I’m including the words “two-dimensional” here for search hits.

Answer 1

def sub_array(xs, rows, columns)
  xs[rows].map { |row| row[columns] }
end

sub_array(a, 1..4, 2..4)
#=> [[8, 3, 5], [4, 0, 8], [8, 7, 4], [4, 5, 4]]