Have you ever needed to load a VERY large file in ruby? No I don’t mean your 500 line rails model. I mean a several gig binary or text file.
Try it. Watch your machine become unresponsive. Cry a little inside. Then reach for enumerable.
Ruby’s Enumerable module gives you a way of iterating over collections in a lazy manner, loading only what you need, when you need it. But it gives us so much more than that.
Today I am going to walk you through a couple of highly useful methods from Enumerable that has come up in a few coding challenges I have done over the years.
I use these methods when I need to determine the ‘distance or difference’ in a set of numbers or objects. each_cons simply gives us a ‘sliding’ window of our list so we can compare multiple items in our list.
numbers = [1,3,5,8,10,54,99]
cards = [5,3,4,6,2]
# get only the values where the distance is greater than 10
numbers.each_cons(2).select {|a,b| b-a>10 } #=> [[10, 54], [54, 99]]
# determine if the hand is a straight
cards.sort.each_cons(5).all? do |series|
(series.first..series.last).to_a == series
end #=> trueOur first example shows how to get the elements in the numbers list that are over 10 units in difference. I do this by using each_cons to give me a sliding window of 2 elements at a time. This give me:
At each step on the way I check b-a and see if that is greater than 10. If so, the select will return those groups of elements.
The second example simply sorts a set of ‘cards’ and then looking at all 5 cards through each_cons and comparing the scores to see if they are in order and in sequence (a+1==b).
Let’s play off this example a bit more, this time with dice. If we have to implement small and large straights, we have a similar problem, with a similar solution:
For the small straight we get 2 windows, becuase there are 5 values in the list and we are calling each_cons(4). Therefore we want a postfix of any? because either of the windows can be a run of 4.
In the second example we use all? to be more explicit, yet any? would have worked as well, because in the large straight, we only have one sliding window, 2,3,4,5,6.
These have to be a few of my favorite methods in enumerable.
Given no args, they take a list of bool values and returns a bool. So [true, true, false].all? #=> false.
Kinda useful, but not really. If we pass it a block of code however.. now we can do something useful. Consider this example:
.any? and .none? do what you probably think. Where .all? only returns true if ALL the conditions and elements match up, .any? returns true if ANY of them match, and .none? returns true if there were NO matches.
Say you have a file to read in line by line. You need to compare the current line to the next line to look for duplicates. each_cons(2) to the rescue!
This will tell us of the current line and the following line are the same.
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