Question

Which data structure is best to organize 32 items. I have 8 groups of 4 items.

Right now I have each item defined and put into an array of 4 (did that 8 times).

Then I took 4 of those arrays of 4 and put them into another array (so the group is half of the total size, i.e. 16).

Then I made a an array with two items, where each entry in the array had 16 items in it.

I’m new to Ruby but there has to be a better way to structure this data.

Help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

Use a hash http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Hash.html you could also benefit from just writing your own classes I suppose.

If you just use the native classes it’s very easy to fit the data structures to what you need:

ree-1.8.7-2010.02 :036 > hsh = {"big"=>[234234, 234243, 23242], "small"=>[1, 2, 3]}
 => {"big"=>[234234, 234243, 23242], "small"=>[1, 2, 3]} 
# access all the values in a single array
ree-1.8.7-2010.02 :037 > hsh.values.flatten
 => [234234, 234243, 23242, 1, 2, 3]