Headshot of Damon Bauer Damon Bauer

Argument Destructuring In Ruby

With a hash in the following structure:

{
  "2019-12-01": [{title: "a title"}, {title: "another title"}],
  "2019-11-01": [{title: "a title"}, {title: "another title"}],
  ...
}

I wanted to iterate over it and find out the index of the iteration. This is easy enough to do, like so:

hash.each_with_index.map { |collection, index| ... }

The problem lies with the collection argument. Since my "collection" in each iteration is a key ("2019-12-01") and a value (the array of hashes), the collection argument doesn't really tell me a whole lot about what it contains.

Let's say I wanted to display the date and render a partial for each hash in the array:

<% hash.each_with_index.map { |collection, index| ... } %>
  <div id="container-<%= index %>">
    <p>Date: <%= collection.first %></p>
    <%= render partial: "items" collection: collection.second %>
  </div>
<% end %>

The collection.first and collection.second have no meaning and are really difficult to understand what they are, so I wanted to fix that.

I could "add" meaning, at the cost of assigning 2 variables in each iteration:

<% hash.each_with_index.map { |collection, index| ... } %>
  <% date = collection.first %>
  <% items = collection.second %>
  
  <div id="container-<%= index %>">
    <p>Date: <%= date %></p>
    <%= render partial: "items" collection: items %>
  </div>
<% end %>

However, I don't like this approach because:

  1. The aforementioned need to assign variables in each iteration
  2. This works for a simple key/value hash setup like this example, but might not work for anything more complex
  3. If the order of the collection hash changes, the variable have to change, too

Coming from the JavaScript world, I've used destructuring quite often:

const obj = { a: "foo", b: "bar" }

// destructure
const { a, b } = obj;

console.log(a) // "foo"
console.log(b) // "bar"

Well, I learned that Ruby has destructuring as well. So, my code can become:

<% hash.each_with_index.map { |(date, items), index| ... } %>
  <div id="container-<%= index %>">
    <p>Date: <%= date %></p>
    <%= render partial: "items" collection: items %>
  </div>
<% end %>
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