Sybmols are essentially a special kind of object. They are denoted by a colon prefixing the object’s name, e.g.:
Announcement
You can find all my latest posts on medium.:{object-name}
You can think of them as a mix between a unique constant and a string, i.e. a constant/string hybrid.
You can think of a symbol, where the name of the variable itself is what we’re interested in, and not what value it hold’s, hence by default a symbol’s value defaults to holding the string of it’s own name:
irb(main):124:0> :var1 => :var1 irb(main):125:0> puts :var1 var1 => nil irb(main):126:0> :var1 = "test" # in fact you can't do this, it will give an error message.
It also means that you don’t need to set a value of a symbol, you just start using it when you need it.
We’ve already come across symbols, as a way to define attributes for a class.
# Here we are defining a class called "Employee" class Employee attr_accessor :age # Notice that we used the special "attr_accessor" end john = Employee.new john.age = "John" # here we are setting the instance variable puts employee1.age # here we are getting the instance variable
What happens here is that attr_accessor has to generate a “get” and “set” method, along with an instance variable. In order to do this, attr_accessor needs to first figure out what to name these methods, and that’s where the “:age” symbol comes in. attr_accessor essentially uses “:age” as a template to generate the method names and instance name, hence behind the scenes attr_accessor, get’s expanded into something like this:
class Employee def set_age (years) @age = years end def get_age @age end end john = Employee.new john.set_age(25) # Notice that the syntax changed a bit, i.e. we are no longer using "=" puts john.get_age # also notice that we now have to use "set_age" and "get_age" methods.
Notice that we also had to change the syntax a bit, using the new methods set_age and get_age. we also have to use the “john.set_age(25)” rather than using the “=”. However you can still go back to using the “=” sign by using the following syntactic approach:
class Employee def set_age=(years) # notice the "=" syntax. @age = years end def get_age @age end end john = Employee.new john.set_age = 25 # here we can use the "=" again puts john.get_age
This is getting really complicated, that’s why as you can see, with symbols (and in this case with conjunction with attr_accessor), the code looks and reads a lot simpler. Symbols make life easier elsewhere too.
Each symbol is an instance of the Symbol class.
symbol literal:
:”abcd”
:”5″
name = “”
http://www.randomhacks.net/2007/01/20/13-ways-of-looking-at-a-ruby-symbol
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/24460/what-is-a-symbol-in-ruby