What is the "right" way to iterate through an array in Ruby?

Question

PHP, for all its warts, is pretty good on this count. There's no difference between an array and a hash (maybe I'm naive, but this seems obviously right to me), and to iterate through either you just do

foreach (array/hash as $key => $value) 

In Ruby there are a bunch of ways to do this sort of thing:

array.length.times do |i| end  array.each  array.each_index  for i in array 

Hashes make more sense, since I just always use

hash.each do |key, value| 

Why can't I do this for arrays? If I want to remember just one method, I guess I can use each_index (since it makes both the index and value available), but it's annoying to have to do array[index] instead of just value.

---

Oh right, I forgot about array.each_with_index. However, this one sucks because it goes |value, key| and hash.each goes |key, value|! Is this not insane?

Answer 1

This will iterate through all the elements:

array = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] array.each { |x| puts x }  # Output:  1 2 3 4 5 6 

This will iterate through all the elements giving you the value and the index:

array = ["A", "B", "C"] array.each_with_index {|val, index| puts "#{val} => #{index}" }  # Output:  A => 0 B => 1 C => 2 

I'm not quite sure from your question which one you are looking for.