Question

Possible Duplicate:
What is the colon operator in Ruby?

While learning Ruby I’ve come across the “:” operator on occasion. Usually I see it in the form of

:symbol => value

what does it mean?

Answer 1

It just indicates a that it is a symbol instead of a string. In ruby, it is common to use symbols instead of strings.

{:foo => value}
{'foo' => value}

It’s basically a short-hand way of expressing a string. It can not contain spaces as you can imagine so symbols usually use underscores.

Try this on your own:

foo = :bar
foo.to_s # means to string
baz = 'goo'
baz.to_sym # means to symbol