Ruby Accessing Array Elements

Question

I have an array that looks like this.

[{"EntryId"=>"2", "Field1"=>"National Life Group","DateCreated"=>"2010-07-30 11:00:14", "CreatedBy"=>"tristanoneil"},
 {"EntryId"=>"3", "Field1"=>"Barton Golf Club", "DateCreated"=>"2010-07-30 11:11:20", "CreatedBy"=>"public"},
 {"EntryId"=>"4", "Field1"=>"PP&D Brochure Distribution", "DateCreated"=>"2010-07-30 11:11:20", "CreatedBy"=>"public"}, 
 {"EntryId"=>"5", "Field1"=>"Prime Renovation Group, DreamMaker Bath & Kitchen",  "DateCreated"=>"2010-07-30 11:11:21", "CreatedBy"=>"public"}
]

How would I go about iterating through this array so I can specify which field I want to print out and get the value, so I could do something like.

puts EntryId.value

Answer 1

The presence of curly braces and hashrockets (=>) means that you are dealing with a Ruby Hash, not an Array.

Luckily, retrieving the value (the thing to the right of the hashrocket) associated with any one key (the thing to the left of the hashrocket) is a piece of cake with Hashes: all you have to do is use the [] operator.

entry = { "EntryId" => "2", "Field1" => "National Life Group", ... }
entry["EntryId"] # returns "2"

Here is the documentation for Hash: http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Hash.html