Enums in Ruby

Question

What's the best way to implement the enum idiom in Ruby? I'm looking for something which I can use (almost) like the Java/C# enums.

Answer 1

Most people use symbols (that's the :foo_bar syntax). They're sort of unique opaque values. Symbols don't belong to any enum-style type so they're not really a faithful representation of C's enum type but this is pretty much as good as it gets.

Answer 2

The most idiomatic way to do this is to use symbols. For example, instead of:

enum {
  FOO,
  BAR,
  BAZ
}

myFunc(FOO);

...you can just use symbols:

# You don't actually need to declare these, of course--this is
# just to show you what symbols look like.
:foo
:bar
:baz

my_func(:foo)

This is a bit more open-ended than enums, but it fits well with the Ruby spirit.

Symbols also perform very well. Comparing two symbols for equality, for example, is much faster than comparing two strings.

Answer 3

Two ways. Symbols (:foo notation) or constants (FOO notation).

Symbols are appropriate when you want to enhance readability without littering code with literal strings.

postal_code[:minnesota] = "MN"
postal_code[:new_york] = "NY"

Constants are appropriate when you have an underlying value that is important. Just declare a class to hold your constants and then declare the constants within that.

class Foo
  BAR = 1
  BAZ = 2
  BIZ = 4
end

flags = Foo::BAR | Foo::BAZ # flags = 3

Answer 4

It all depends how you use Java or C# enums. How you use it will dictate the solution you'll choose in Ruby.

Try the native Set type, for instance:

>> enum = Set['a', 'b', 'c']
=> #<Set: {"a", "b", "c"}>
>> enum.member? "b"
=> true
>> enum.member? "d"
=> false
>> enum.add? "b"
=> nil
>> enum.add? "d"
=> #<Set: {"a", "b", "c", "d"}>

Answer 5

Symbols is the ruby way. However, sometimes one need to talk to some C code or something or Java that expose some enum for various things.

---

#server_roles.rb
module EnumLike

  def EnumLike.server_role
    server_Symb=[ :SERVER_CLOUD, :SERVER_DESKTOP, :SERVER_WORKSTATION]
    server_Enum=Hash.new
    i=0
    server_Symb.each{ |e| server_Enum[e]=i; i +=1}
    return server_Symb,server_Enum
  end

end

---

This can then be used like this

---

require 'server_roles'

sSymb, sEnum =EnumLike.server_role()

foreignvec[sEnum[:SERVER_WORKSTATION]]=8

---

This is can of course be made abstract and you can roll our own Enum class

Answer 6

Someone went ahead and wrote a ruby gem called Renum. It claims to get the closest Java/C# like behavior. Personally I'm still learning Ruby, and I was a little shocked when I wanted to make a specific class contain a static enum, possibly a hash, that it wasn't exactly easily found via google.

Answer 7

Another approach is to use a Ruby class with a hash containing names and values as described in the following RubyFleebie blog post. This allows you to convert easily between values and constants (especially if you add a class method to lookup the name for a given value).

Answer 8

I think the best way to implement enumeration like types is with symbols since the pretty much behave as integer (when it comes to performace, object_id is used to make comparisons ); you don't need to worry about indexing and they look really neat in your code xD