Sort in ruby a JSON array of hashes

Question

So I have an array of hashes:

[{"id":"30","name":"Dave"},
 {"id":"57","name":"Mike"},
 {"id":"9","name":"Kevin"},
 ...
 {"id":"1","name":"Steve"}]

And I want to sort it by the id attribute, so that it looks like this:

[{"id":"1","name":"Steve"},
 {"id":"2","name":"Walter"},
 ...
 {"id":"60","name":"Chester"}]

I'm assuming I use the sort_by method but I'm not exactly sure how to do it.

Answer 1

This should work:

array.sort_by { |hash| hash['id'].to_i }

In this case, sort_by is preferred over sort because it is more efficient. While sort calls to_i on every comparison, sort_by does it once for each element in array and remembers the result.