Comments on: Rails’ symbols: don’t create them dynamically!

By: brianlopez

brianlopez — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 05:42:19 +0000

It should be noted that using/creating “dynamic” symbols is sometimes the *desired* behavior – say for turning a result set into a Ruby Hash.
In this case, the number of symbols is tied to the number of columns/key names in the result set. And if the result set is large enough, it's actually *more* efficient to use symbols as they're only allocated once. Whereas if string keys were to be used, an incredible amount of memory (and later Garbage Collection) would have to occur on a result set of the same (albeit, large) size.

By: alex grande

alex grande — Mon, 18 May 2009 05:33:46 +0000

for a noob like me –

#{hardware_item.name.downcase}

is creating the symbol?

And what's the difference between

formatted["bolts"]

and

formatted[:bolts]