Setting a Default Value in Hash
Explore how to set default values in Ruby hashes to simplify counting word frequencies in text. Understand the problem of nil values, how to avoid errors by initializing hashes with default values, and improve code clarity and efficiency using practical Ruby techniques.
We'll cover the following...
Interview question
It is often useful to have default values in a hash. We might even want to make a bookmark since we can use this trick while solving interview questions. We’ll take a look at one of these questions.
Given a sentence, calculate the usage frequency for each word. For example, there are two “the” words in the sentence, one “dog,” and so on. How do we solve this problem?
Imagine we have the string "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". Let’s split this string into an array, ...