What's the ruby way of grouping elements of an array?

[Sam Kong]

Hi,

I thought this would be a common need but I couldn't find a method.

Let's say I have an array of objects.
I want to group the elements by a property of objects.

people.group_by do |person|
person.age
end

The above method should return an array of arrays grouped by age.

What's the ruby way for this case?
I think I can implement it but I am sure that a good way already exists.

Thanks.

Sam

 

[Rob Biedenharn]

Hi,

I thought this would be a common need but I couldn't find a method.

Let's say I have an array of objects.
I want to group the elements by a property of objects.

people.group_by do |person|
person.age
end

The above method should return an array of arrays grouped by age.

What's the ruby way for this case?
I think I can implement it but I am sure that a good way already
exists.

Thanks.

Sam

ActiveSupport (part of Rails, but usable separately as a gem) does this:

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Enumerable.html#M001111
# File vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/
enumerable.rb, line 17
17: def group_by
18: inject({}) do |groups, element|
19: (groups[yield(element)] ||= []) << element
20: groups
21: end
22: end

This returns a hash of age=>[people], but you could deal with that
by .values or sorting or whatever makes the most sense for your
application.

-Rob

Rob Biedenharn http://agileconsultingllc.com
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Ilan Berci]

The above method should return an array of arrays grouped by age.

What's the ruby way for this case?
I think I can implement it but I am sure that a good way already exists.

Thanks.

Sam

If you require 'action_pack' you get group_by() for free
=> {false=>[9, 5, 3, 6, 0, 8, 3, 4, 9, 2, 0, 0, 10, 1], true=>[15, 13,
18, 12, 13, 14]}
hth

ilan

 

[William James]

Hi,

I thought this would be a common need but I couldn't find a method.

Let's say I have an array of objects.
I want to group the elements by a property of objects.

people.group_by do |person|
person.age
end

The above method should return an array of arrays grouped by age.

What's the ruby way for this case?
I think I can implement it but I am sure that a good way already exists.

Thanks.

Sam

It's pretty simple.

class Array
def group_by
h = Hash.new{ [] }
each{|x|
h[ yield( x ) ] += [ x ]
}
h.values
end
end

p %w(a little while ago I heard the tittering of a mouse).
group_by{|s| s.size }

 

[Morton Goldberg]

I thought this would be a common need but I couldn't find a method.

Let's say I have an array of objects. I want to group the elements
by a property of objects.

people.group_by do |person|
person.age
end

The above method should return an array of arrays grouped by age.

What's the ruby way for this case? I think I can implement it but
I am sure that a good way already exists.

It's pretty simple.

class Array
def group_by
h = Hash.new{ [] }
each{|x|
h[ yield( x ) ] += [ x ]
}
h.values
end
end

That's good, but I think the following modification makes it a
little better:

<code>
class Array
def group_by
h = Hash.new { |h, k| h[k] = [] }
each { |item| h[yield(item)] << item }
h.values
end
end
</code>

Regards, Morton

 

[Peña, Botp]

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