Question

Program I’m making has a simple configuration file looking something like this.

@overlays = {
  :foo => "http://www.bar.com",
  :bar => nil,
}

What I need to do is go through this hash and get the following output.

OverlayKey[0]='foo'
OverlayVal[0]='http://www.bar.com'
OverlayKey[1]='bar'
OverlayVal[1]='nil'

In order to keep my configuration like I want it I need some fake index numbers. Would rather not add numbers into the hash, it would make the configuration look a bit ugly. So I been playing around with artificially generating the numbers during output.

This is ugly but I”m just playing around with it currently.

def makenumbers
  @numbers = [] 
  length = @overlays.length - 1
  (0..length).each do |num|
    @numbers.push("#{num}")
  end
end

makenumbers

@overlays.each do |key,val|
  @numbers.each do |num|
    puts "OverlayKey['#{num}']='#{key}'"
    puts "OverlayVal['#{num}']='#{val}'"
  end
end

Which is giving me something like this.

OverlayKey['0']='foo'
OverlayVal['0']='http://www.bar.com'
OverlayKey['1']='foo'
OverlayVal['1']='http://www.bar.com'
OverlayKey['0']='bar'
OverlayVal['0']=''
OverlayKey['1']='bar'
OverlayVal['1']=''

Understand why this doesn’t give me the output I want, although after playing with it for a bit I’m not really sure how to do what I want without adding numbers into the hash during configuration. Sure this is pretty simple I just can’t seem to wrap my head around it.

Answer 1

I don’t know what the problem is other than Hashes are unsorted by default:

overlays = {
  :foo => "http://www.bar.com",
  :bar => nil,
}

overlays.each_with_index do |(k,v), i|
  puts "OverlayKey['#{i}']=#{k.to_s.inspect}"
  puts "OverlayVal['#{i}']=#{v.to_s.inspect}"
end

Output looks like this:

OverlayKey['0']="bar"
OverlayVal['0']=""
OverlayKey['1']="foo"
OverlayVal['1']="http://www.bar.com"

As a note:

# Instead of this:
"#{num}"
# Use this:
num.to_s