Duplicating a Ruby array of strings

Question

arr = ["red","green","yellow"]

arr2 = arr.clone
arr2[0].replace("blue")

puts arr.inspect
puts arr2.inspect

produces:

["blue", "green", "yellow"]
["blue", "green", "yellow"]

Is there anyway to do a deep copy of an array of strings, other than using Marshal as i understand that is a hack.

I could do:

arr2 = []
arr.each do |e|
  arr2 << e.clone
end

but it doesn't seem very elegant, or efficient.

Thanks

Answer 1

I am in a similar situation and very concerned about speed. The fastest way for me was to make use of map{&:clone}

So try this:

pry(main)> a = (10000..1000000).to_a.shuffle.map(&:to_s)
pry(main)> Benchmark.ms { b = a.deep_dup }                                                                                     
=> 660.7760030310601
pry(main)> Benchmark.ms { b = a.join("--!--").split("--!--") }
=> 605.0828141160309
pry(main)> Benchmark.ms { b = a.map(&:clone) }
=> 450.8283680770546

Answer 2

Your second solution can be shortened to arr2 = arr.map do |e| e.dup end (unless you actually need the behaviour of clone, it's recommended to use dup instead).

Other than that your two solutions are basically the standard solutions to perform a deep copy (though the second version is only one-level deep (i.e. if you use it on an array of arrays of strings, you can still mutate the strings)). There isn't really a nicer way.

Edit: Here's a recursive deep_dup method that works with arbitrarily nested arrays:

class Array
  def deep_dup
    map {|x| x.deep_dup}
  end
end

class Object
  def deep_dup
    dup
  end
end

class Numeric
  # We need this because number.dup throws an exception
  # We also need the same definition for Symbol, TrueClass and FalseClass
  def deep_dup
    self
  end
end

You might also want to define deep_dup for other containers (like Hash), otherwise you'll still get a shallow copy for those.