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Why I love Ruby Enumerable#inject

Post created 2013-12-04 13:58 by Gabe Koss.



Rubys Enumerable class is one of the most powerful tools the language has to offer. In particular, I love the Enumerable#inject method.

How does it work?

Lets start with a simple example.

Given I have an array of numbers ( [1,2,3] ), lets use inject to sum them up.

def sum(array) array.inject(0) do |sum, i| sum += i end end sum([1,2,3]) #=> 6

You'll notice that I passed two arguments to the block: sum and i . The sum initializes to the argument passed to the inject() method call, in this case 0 . As the array is iterated across the return value of the block is returned as the next sum when the next element in the array is yielded as i .

In several Reddit comments as well as a note in the comments from Victor Kmita I was reminded of the simplest format for this to work. When all that is being done in the block is a single method call this can be simplified by passing the method call in as a symbol and dropping the block entirely.

def sum(arr) arr.inject(:+) end sum([1,2,3]) #=> 6

Complex Counting

Lets try a slightly more complex example. Lets take a sentence and return a hash, indexed by word with a value of the count of occurences of that word in the sentence.

def count_of_words(str) str.split(' ').inject(Hash.new(0)) do |count_hash, word| count_hash[word] += 1 count_hash end end count_of_words('ruby is awesome and ruby is great') # => {"ruby"=>2, "is"=>2, "awesome"=>1, "and"=>1, "great"=>1}

You'll notice that in this case I have to explicitly call the count_hash at the end of the block. This is because the count_hash[word] += 1 line will return the value of word and that would (incorrectly) get passed as the next count_hash

An obvious improvement on this would be a more robust mechanism used to convert the input str into an array. Splitting on whitespace is fine for this example.

Inverted Index

Another similar example to the word counting trick would be to do a reverse index. An inverted index is a simple data structure which allows you to do a lookup for a keyword and provides a list of locations where that word occurred.

# Assumes an input format like: # # { "/path/to/file" => "contents of file" } # # # # Edit: Thanks to reddit users jhawthorn and treetrouble for suggesting the # # improvement of using `Hash.new{|h,k| h[k] = []}` instead of `Hash.new([])` to # # greatly improve the readability of this example. # def inverted_index_for(file_hash) h = Hash.new { |h,k| h[k] = [] } file_hash.inject(h) do |index_array,(filename,contents)| contents.split(' ').uniq.each do |word| index_array[word] << filename end index_array end end

This has many improvements and could stand to be refactored out into some other methods as well as deal with case sensitivity ( 'round' != 'Round' ) and special characters but for the purposes of demonstrating inject() it is good enough!

Lets see it at work.

files = {} files['~/file_0'] = "the wheels on the bus go" files['~/file_1'] = "round and round" files['~/file_2'] = "round and round" files['~/file_3'] = "round and round" files['~/file_4'] = "the wheels on the bus go" files['~/file_5'] = "round and round" files['~/file_6'] = "all through the town" inverted_index = inverted_index_for(files) # => { # "the" => ["~/file_0", "~/file_4", "~/file_6"], # "wheels" => ["~/file_0", "~/file_4"], # "on" => ["~/file_0", "~/file_4"], # "bus" => ["~/file_0", "~/file_4"], # "go" => ["~/file_0", "~/file_4"], # "round" => ["~/file_1", "~/file_2", "~/file_3", "~/file_5"], # "and" => ["~/file_1", "~/file_2", "~/file_3", "~/file_5"], # "all" => ["~/file_6"], # "through" => ["~/file_6"], # "town" => ["~/file_6"] # } # Look up a word to find where it occurred: inverted_index["round"] # => ["~/file_1", "~/file_2", "~/file_3", "~/file_5"]

Bottom Line

inject() is hugely useful for many different tasks. Anywhere I find myself using chained map() or each() functions I can usually accomplish the same thing with a single inject() .

Update: After some feedback on the comments below as well as on Reddit I did a little of benchmarking around this. Those results are here.

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