I have a few similarly named arrays and I need to loop through the array names:
level_1_foo
level_2_foo
level_3_foo
level_4_foo
level_5_foo
I'd like to do something like the following where x is the value of the digit in the array name:
(1..5).each do |x|
level_x_foo << some-value
end
Can this be done?
I've tried "level_#{x}_foo", level_+x+_foo, and a couple others, to no success.
Thanks
You could do something like this
# Initialize a hash
levels = {}
# Initialize your arrays
(1..5).each do |x|
levels["level_#{x}_foo"] = []
end
# Now you can access your arrays like this
(1..5).each do |x|
levels["level_#{x}_foo"] << 'some-value'
end
One way to do it is to retrieve the arrays with binding.local_variable_get:
(1..5).each do |x|
binding.local_variable_get("level_#{x}_foo") << some-value
end
You could also do it with eval, but the above approach minimizes the code that is dynamically evaluated.
eval after I posted my question. I also read it was sketchy to use it. I had not seen the binding.local_variable_get() before. And now I know.
data = {1 => some_value, 2 => some_other_value}You can then easily access the data withdata[1]. Having to "dynamically" access a variable is generally an anti-pattern and should be replaced with actual data structures (which is also much faster usually).