Working with Hashes

Dictionaries: look up one thing by another

Hashes are another very useful, and widely used kind of thing that can be used to store other objects.

Unlike arrays which are mere lists, Hashes are like dictionaries:

Imagine a real dictionary that translates from English to German. When you look up the English word “hello” then you’ll find the German “Hallo”. When you look up “one” then you’ll find “eins”, and so on. The authors of this dictionary have assigned a German word (a value) to an English word (the key).

Key	Value
Hello	Hallo
one	eins

Hashes work pretty much like this.

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A Hash assigns values to keys, so that values can be looked up by their key.

We also refer to a ...