Symbols

[Majglow]

I just finished going over the Programming Ruby book (pragmatic programmers). I pretty much got everything except Symbols. I'm not too sure what they are and what the use of them is.

Could somebody please help fill me in?

[Fenrir2]

Symbols are like strings, but symbols are important to the program, and strings are user data.

Example:

Say you want to code program that generates HTML for a website. You execute it via the command line. You want to be able to configure the color scheme of your website. So you set a variable in the configuration:

color = "red"

then you have this in your generation:

if color == "red"
  # create a red website
elseif color == "green"
  # create a green website
...
...

But in Ruby, you would use symbols instead:

color = :red

if color == :red
  # create a red website
elseif color == :green
  # create a green website
...
...

Because the data is important for the behavior of the program.

Another example: if you want to create an application which manages clients of a company. The company wants to know how to contact them, so they ask the client's email address, postal code and telephone number. The company wants to know what is the preferred way to contact their clients. You can use this data structure:

person1 = {
:name => 'Chris Johnsson',
:telephone => '9235792739',
:postal_code => '23423',
:email => 'chris@johnsson.com',
:contact_method => :email
}

There are two uses of symbols here: for the hash's keys, and for the contact_method. You can use a symbol here because there is a limited set of contact methods.

If you wanted to print the contact information, you could use this code:

puts person1[person1[:contact_method]]

This would print the email adress: chris@johnsson.com. But if you set the contact_method to : postal_code, this would print 23423.

I hope this is clear.

[Majglow]

Thanks, that cleared things up for me. I have another question not TOO related but I didn't feel like starting a new thread. Basically, I don't understand the following syntax:

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
validates_presence_of :title, :description, :image_url
validates_numericality_of :price
validates_uniqueness_of :title
end

Are we defining methods? Calling methods? I don't see what's going on syntax wise.

[Brak]

You're calling methods. You could write the same thing this way:

validates_presence_of(:title, :description, :image_url)

[samsm]

http://onestepback.org/index.cgi/Tec...bleStrings.red

[xmitchx]

The reason that symbols are better for programming data is because they use less memory than do strings. So using :red instead of "red" is better for the computer/server the application is running on

And for the class you don't understand, yes, you're calling methods, but it's important to note that they are CLASS METHODS not instance methods. So deining a class method must be prefixed with "self" or the class name or under a derivitive of "self" like so:

class Bla
  class << self
    def bla; end
  end
end