By: Bruce Bahlmann - Contributing Author (your feedback is important to us!)

In rails development, you will often want to access a hash data structure. However rather than explicitly accessing an element (hash["field"]) you will want to use a variable in place of the explicit text/string of the field name.

If on tries to do this, (in the example below, we are testing a desired hash field for nil - where in this case field is our variable name) you might think that one of the following would work:

hash.field.nil?

or

hash[field].nil?

Surprisingly, this is not the case. Instead, you must do the following in order for a variable to be used to access a hash element:

hash.send(field).nil?

.

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