While Ruby’s each method is useful, it also comes with an awesome extended family of methods that are even more powerful!
For the next few examples, we’ll work with a slightly more complex data structure. It look like this:
friends = [
{
name: "Diego",
status: "Online"
},
{
name: "Liam",
status: "Away"
},
{
name: "Gloria",
status: "Online"
},
{
name: "Charlie",
status: "Away"
}
]
select is similar to each in that we pass it a block to run on each element in the collection, but the similarities stop there. The important difference is that select will return a new collection with only the items that the block returned true for. It sounds pretty intimidating at first, so let’s walk through an example.
We can use select to create a new Array filled with only our online friends:
online_friends = friends.select do |friend|
friend[:status] == "Online"
end
Because the block is so short, it would also work well as a one-liner:
online_friends = friends.select{|friend| friend[:status] == "Online"}
select will go through each element one at a time, starting with {name: “Diego”, status: “Online”}, passing it to the block we wrote. The block contains a single line: friend[:status] == “Online”. That line returns either true or false. If the block returns true, that specific item is added to a new Array that will be returned at the very end of select.
This table shows each step of the process:
At the very end, select returns this Array which we save to a new online_friends variable:
[{ name: "Diego", status: "Online"}, { name: "Gloria", status: "Online"}]