Enumerated Types

Ruby
1

As part of a solution, I wish the value of an attribute to be one of a
finite set of values, in other words I believe I want an ‘enumerated
type’. I’ve look at the ‘Enumerable’ and ‘Enumerator’ class and they
appear to me to be unrelated to what I wish to achieve (correct me if
I’m wrong).

I could do the traditional method of named constants with integer
values but I can’t help feeling that there must be a class or some
nice method of doing this. Any advice would be appreciated.

2

On 03.02.2007 19:52, Dan Stevens (IAmAI) wrote:

As part of a solution, I wish the value of an attribute to be one of a
finite set of values, in other words I believe I want an ‘enumerated
type’. I’ve look at the ‘Enumerable’ and ‘Enumerator’ class and they
appear to me to be unrelated to what I wish to achieve (correct me if
I’m wrong).

I could do the traditional method of named constants with integer
values but I can’t help feeling that there must be a class or some
nice method of doing this. Any advice would be appreciated.

I believe there are enum classes in the RAA. If you do not want to use
them, symbols come pretty close:

class YourClass
YOUR_ENUM = [
:old,
:young,
:unknown,
].freeze
end

HTH

Kind regards

robert

3

It seems to me that I should simply be able to use symbols as values
for my enumerated types, like for example:

class Color

def initialize(color)
@color = color
end

def to_hex
case @color
when :red: 0xFF0000
when :green: 0x00FF00
when :blue: 0x0000FF
else @color
end
end

end

c = Color.new(:red)
puts c.to_hex.to_s(16)

Might there be any reason why I shouldn’t do this, or am I quite fine
doing this?

4

On 2/5/07, Dan Stevens (IAmAI) [email protected] wrote:

def to_hex
c = Color.new(:red)
puts c.to_hex.to_s(16)

Might there be any reason why I shouldn’t do this, or am I quite fine
doing this?

This is fine. You may want to use a hash to make life simpler though:
class Color
HexValues = { :red => 0xFF0000, :green => 0x00FF00, :blue =>
0x0000FF }
def to_hex
HexValues[@color] or @color
end
end

5

On 05.02.2007 20:54, Dan Stevens (IAmAI) wrote:

case @color
puts c.to_hex.to_s(16)

Might there be any reason why I shouldn’t do this, or am I quite fine
doing this?

That’s perfectly ok. If you need your enums only for mapping then I’d
probably do this:

Color = Struct.new :name do
CODES = Hash.new {|h,k| k}.update(
:red => 0xFF0000,
:green => 0x00FF00
# …
)

def to_hex; CODES[name] end
end

irb(main):010:0> Color.new(:red).to_hex.to_s 16
=> “ff0000”

If you need more enum dependent behavior you might want put more complex
objects into the hash instead of only Fixnums.

Kind regards

robert

6

On 2/3/07, Dan Stevens (IAmAI) [email protected] wrote:

As part of a solution, I wish the value of an attribute to be one of a
finite set of values, in other words I believe I want an ‘enumerated
type’. I’ve look at the ‘Enumerable’ and ‘Enumerator’ class and they
appear to me to be unrelated to what I wish to achieve (correct me if
I’m wrong).

I could do the traditional method of named constants with integer
values but I can’t help feeling that there must be a class or some
nice method of doing this. Any advice would be appreciated.

I picked up this snippet of code:

-------±--------±--------±------- +

--------±--------±--------±--------+

Add methods enum and bit_enum to the Object class, thus making it

much

easier and less error-prone to define a long list of constants in a

class. This idea comes from Ara.T.Howard@noaa, in a posting to

ruby-talk

on August 2, 2005 (in reply to a question). These work very nicely

with

a word-list array as generated via %w(). Very clever!

class Object
def enum_constants(*list)
mc = Module === self ? self : self.class
list.flatten.each_with_index{|e, i| mc.const_set e.to_s.intern, i}
end
def enum_bit_constants(*list)
mc = Module === self ? self : self.class
list.flatten.each_with_index{|e, i| mc.const_set e.to_s.intern, 2 **
i}
end
end

-------±--------±--------±------- +

--------±--------±--------±--------+

An example of using it:

#   Constants that define all categories of packets which we

recognize.
enum_constants %w(
SBC_NONE SBC_ARRAY SBC_NONUSER SBC_NO_IDSTR
SBC_IGNFAIL SBC_ALL
SBC_UNMATCHED )

The difference between enum_constants() and enum_bit_constants is
that enum_constants will define the values as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc, while
enum_bit_constants will define them as 1,2,4,8,16,32. You can ‘or’
the enum_bit_constant values together, and each one is a separate
bit so it won’t clobber any other bit constant.

If you are not used to the %w() method of quoting, note that you only
put the names you want in there. You do not separate them with
commas!