Nested Hash Iteration

##Objectives

1. Iterate over a nested hash

At this point you should be familiar with iterating over hashes that have one level—a series of key/value pairs on a single tier. For example:

jon_snow = {
  name: "Jon",
  email: "[e-mail]"
}

What happens when we want to iterate over a multidimensional hash like the one below? Let's iterate over our nested hash one level at a time; iterating over the first level of our hash would look like this:

contacts = {
  "Jon Snow" => {
    name: "Jon",
    email: "[e-mail]", 
    favorite_ice_cream_flavors: ["chocolate", "vanilla", "mint chip"],
		knows: nil
  },
  "Freddy Mercury" => {
    name: "Freddy",
    email: "[e-mail]",
    favorite_ice_cream_flavors: ["strawberry", "cookie dough", "mint chip"]
  }
}

contacts.each do |person, data|
  puts "#{person}: #{data}"
end

This should return:

Jon Snow:      
{ :name=>"Jon", 
  :email=>"[e-mail]", 
  :favorite_ice_cream_flavors=>["chocolate", "vanilla", "mint chip"],
  :knows=>nil
}

Freddy Mercury: 
{ :name=>"Freddy", 
:email=>"[e-mail]", 
:favorite_ice_cream_flavors=>["strawberry", "cookie dough", "mint chip"]
}

On the first level, the keys are our contacts' names, "Jon Snow" and "Freddy Mercury", and our values are the hashes that contain a series of key/value pairs describing them.

Let's iterate over the second level of our contacts hash. In order to access the key/value pairs of the second tier (i.e. the name, email, and other data about each contact), we need to iterate down into that level. So, we pick up where we left off with the previous iteration and we keep going:

contacts.each do |person, data|
  #at this level, "person" is Jon Snow or Freddy Mercury and "data" is a hash of key/value pairs
  #to iterate over the "data" hash, we can use the following line: 
  
  data.each do |attribute, value|
    puts "#{attribute}: #{value}"
  end
end

That should output the following:

name: Jon
email: [e-mail]
favorite_ice_cream_flavors: ["chocolate", "vanilla", "mint chip"]
knows: nil

name: Freddy
email: [e-mail]
favorite_ice_cream_flavors: ["strawberry", "cookie dough", "mint chip"]

Let's take it one step further and print out just the favorite ice cream flavors. Once again, we'll need to iterate down into that level of the hash, then we can access the favorite ice cream array and print out the flavors:

contacts.each do |person, data|
  #at this level, "person" is Jon Snow or Freddy and "data" is a hash of key/value pairs
  #to iterate over the "data" hash, we can use the following line: 
  
  data.each do |attribute, value|
    #at this level, "attribute" describes the key of :name, :email, :favorite_ice_cream_flavors, or :knows
    #we need to first check and see if the key is :favorite_ice_cream_flavors,
    #if it is, that means the VALUE is an array that we can iterate over to print out each element
    
    if attribute == :favorite_ice_cream_flavors
      value.each do |flavor|
        # here, each index element in an ice cream flavor string
        puts "#{flavor}"
      end
    end
  end
end

This should output:

chocolate
vanilla
mint chip
strawberry
cookie dough
mint chip

View Iterating Over Nested Hashes on Learn.co and start learning to code for free.

View Nested Hash Iteration on Learn.co and start learning to code for free.

View Nested Hash Iteration on Learn.co and start learning to code for free.