Eliminating Extra Code with each_with_object
I’ve been listening to Avdi Grimm’s Confident Ruby screencast and came across a function I’d never really used before: each_with_object. each_with_object allows you to iterate over a collection, passing the current item and the memo (the object that was passed in) to the block. The memo must be a mutable object, like an array or hash, not an immutable object such as a string or integer.
Here’s an example:
Without each_with_object, I have to set up a result hash, return if what I'm attempting to iterate over is a blank array, and return the result hash at the end.
def get_results(users) users = users.to_a result = {} return result if users.blank? users.each do |u| result[u.result_id] = u end result end
With each_with_object, I am able to eliminate three lines of code, practically cutting my method in half. I instantiate the empty hash by passing it to each_with_object and each_with_object also does the work of returning the finished hash.
def get_results(users) users = users.to_a users.each_with_object({}) do |u, result| result[u.result_id] = u end end
