Turning a Hash of Arrays into an Array of Hashes in Ruby

Question

We have the following datastructures:

{:a => ["val1", "val2"], :b => ["valb1", "valb2"], ...}

And I want to turn that into

[{:a => "val1", :b => "valb1"}, {:a => "val2", :b => "valb2"}, ...]

And then back into the first form. Anybody with a nice looking implementation?

Answer 1

You could use inject to build an array of hashes.

hash = { :a => ["val1", "val2"], :b => ["valb1", "valb2"] }
array = hash.inject([]) do |pairs, pair|
  pairs << { pair[0] => pair[1] }
  pairs
end
array.inspect # => "[{:a=>["val1", "val2"]}, {:b=>["valb1", "valb2"]}]"

Ruby documentation has a few more examples of working with inject.

Answer 2

This will work assuming all the arrays in the original hash are the same size:

hash_array = hash.first[1].map { {} }
hash.each do |key,arr|
  hash_array.zip(arr).each {|inner_hash, val| inner_hash[key] = val}
end

Answer 3

This solution works with arbitrary numbers of values (val1, val2...valN):

{:a => ["val1", "val2"], :b => ["valb1", "valb2"]}.inject([]){|a, (k,vs)| 
  vs.each_with_index{|v,i| (a[i] ||= {})[k] = v} 
  a
}
# => [{:a=>"val1", :b=>"valb1"}, {:a=>"val2", :b=>"valb2"}]

[{:a=>"val1", :b=>"valb1"}, {:a=>"val2", :b=>"valb2"}].inject({}){|a, h| 
  h.each_pair{|k,v| (a[k] ||= []) << v}
  a
}
# => {:a=>["val1", "val2"], :b=>["valb1", "valb2"]}

Answer 4

Let's look closely what the data structure we are trying to convert between:

#Format A
[
 ["val1", "val2"],          :a
 ["valb1", "valb2"],        :b 
 ["valc1", "valc2"]         :c 
]
#Format B
[ :a        :b       :c
 ["val1", "valb1", "valc1"],
 ["val2", "valb2", "valc3"]
]

It is not diffculty to find Format B is the transpose of Format A in essential , then we can come up with this solution:

h={:a => ["vala1", "vala2"], :b => ["valb1", "valb2"], :c => ["valc1", "valc2"]}
sorted_keys =  h.keys.sort_by {|a,b| a.to_s <=> b.to_s}

puts sorted_keys.inject([])  {|s,e| s << h[e]}.transpose.inject([])   {|r, a| r << Hash[*sorted_keys.zip(a).flatten]}.inspect
#[{:b=>"valb1", :c=>"valc1", :a=>"vala1"}, {:b=>"valb2", :c=>"valc2", :a=>"vala2"}]

Answer 5

m = {}
a,b = Array(h).transpose
b.transpose.map { |y| [a, y].transpose.inject(m) { |m,x| m.merge Hash[*x] }}