Question

In some scenario of Ruby 1.8. If I have a hash

# k is name, v is order foo = { 'Jim' => 1, 'bar' => 1, 'joe' => 2} sorted_by_values = foo.sort {|a, b| a[1] <==> b[1]} #sorted_by_values is an array of array, it's no longer a hash! sorted_by_values.keys.join ','  

my workaround is to make method to_hash for Array class.

class Array   def to_hash(&block)     Hash[*self.collect { |k, v|       [k, v]     }.flatten]   end end 

I can then do the following:

sorted_by_values.to_hash.keys.join ',' 

Is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

Hashes are unordered by definition. There can be no such thing as a sorted Hash. Your best bet is probably to extract the keys from the sorted array using collect and then do a join on the result

sortedByValues = foo.sort {|a, b| a[1] <==> b[1]} sortedByValues.collect { |a| a[0] }.join ','