gikie

 Profile Answers by gikie 

• Dec 14th, 2009

 

:var : Semicolon followed by an identifier tells us that var is symbol.

Two strings with same content may belong to two totally different objetcs but if you convert these two strings to symbol, both of them belongs to the same symbol object.

If a string is used as a unique identifier then it is always good to define it as a symbol.

vijay prasad

• Jul 22nd, 2011

 

In Ruby the :var is used to define a symbol. A symbol ii ruby is created by adding 'colon' in-front of variable name .You can also create symbol by transforming a string to symbol using string#intern.

For example:

Code
  name[:first_name]='vijay'


  name['last_name'.intern]=' Prasad'