What exactly do the blocks represent?

Question

Absolute newbie at Ruby. I don't really understand the |animal| section. Can someone please explain it to me?

ark = ["Cat", "dog", "pig", "goat"]
ark.each do |animal|
    puts animal
end

see here http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-2.1.1/Array.html#method-i-each. Read doc first, this is very simple. — Arup Rakshit, Apr 05 '14 at 18:09

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 05 '14 at 18:18

In other languages the syntax may look something like this:

ark = ["Cat", "dog", "pig", "goat"];
ark.each(function (animal) { puts animal; });

Does that clear it up? It's the syntax for an anonymous function. If you're not familiar with that concept, how about this?

function putAnimal(animal) {
    puts animal;
}

ark = ["Cat", "dog", "pig", "goat"];
ark.each(putAnimal);

|animal| is the argument list for the anonymous function. Very roughly speaking, Ruby's syntax for the common function (arg) { ... } is do |arg| ... end.

What exactly do the blocks represent?

1 Answers1