On Wed, 10 Nov 2004 01:08:38 +0900, Kevin Böògens <kevin / boergens.de> wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> This is my first ruby day. I started reading the ruby book two hours ago and
> want to do something useful now :-)
> I have a hash and I want to iterate trough all pairs of values. An example:
> 
> h = {"john" => 41, "mary" => 31, "fred" => 10}
> #insert control structure here
>      age=(h[person1]+h[person2]).to_s
>        puts "#person1 shakes hands with #person2. Together they are #age
> years old"
> 
> The output could for example be:
> 
> john shakes hands with mary. Together they are 72 years old
> john shakes hands with fred. Together they are 51 years old
> mary shakes hands with fred. Together they are 41 years old
> 
> what I do at the moment:
> 
> h = {"john" => 41, "mary" => 31, "fred" => 10}
> h.each_key{|person1|
>   h.each_key{|person2|
>     if h.sort.index([person1,h[person1]])<h.sort.index([person2,h[person2]])
>      age=(h[person1]+h[person2]).to_s
>        puts "#{person1} shakes hands with #{person2}. Together they are
> #{age} years old"
>     end }}
> 
> Is there a more elegant way to do this?

Myself, I would add a method to Enumerable. This lets you separate a
lot of the logic:

module Enumerable
  def each_permutation
    history = []
    each do |item1|
      history.each{|item2| yield [item1,item2]}
      history << item1
    end
  end
end

Then:

h = {"john" => 41, "mary" => 31, "fred" => 10}
h.each_permutation do |(person1, age1), (person2, age2)|
  puts "#{person1} shakes hands with #{person2}." +
    "Together they are #{age1+age2} years old."
end

HTH,
Mark

> TIA,
>  Kevin
> 
>