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Asked: 2026-05-19T09:08:50+00:00

While learning Ruby I’ve come across the => operator on occasion. Usually I see

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

:symbol => value

and it seems to be used frequently when passing values to functions. What exactly is that operator called? What does it do/mean? Is it built into Ruby or is it something that different frameworks like Rails and DataMapper add to the symbol class? Is it only used in conjunction with the symbol class? Thanks.

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  1. Editorial Team

    => separates the keys from the values in a hashmap literal. It is not overloadable and not specifically connected to symbols.

    A hashmap literal has the form {key1 => value1, key2 => value2, ...}, but when used as the last parameter of a function, you can leave off the curly braces. So when you see a function call like f(:a => 1, :b => 2), f is called with one argument, which is a hashmap that has the keys :a and :b and the values 1 and 2.

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