4 ways to pass parameters to a method in Ruby

Recently I have been dreaming and talking a lot about methods. Here are few cool things which I discovered on my way to get better at Ruby. I’ll talk about different ways in which we can pass parameters to a method. Continue to find out how many of them did you knew already. You can read my difference between class methods and instance methods for some more fun.

The common method

def full_name(first, last)
  "#{first} #{last}"
end

full_name('sam', 'smith')
=> "sam smith"

Named parameters

def parse(name: 'Jhon', hero: 'superman')
  "I am #{name}, the #{hero}"
end

parse
=> "I am Jhon, the superman"

parse(name: 'Harry Potter', hero: 'wizard')
=> "I am Harry Potter, the wizard"

parse(name: 'Luffy', food: 'meat')
# ArgumentError: unknown keyword: food

Any number of unnamed parameters

def attributes(*args)
 args.join(', ')
end

attributes('hi', 'how', 'are', 'you')
=> "hi, how, are, you"

Any number of named parameters

def fields(args = {})
  args.each do |k,v|
    puts k, v
  end
end

fields(name: 'adf', fasd: 'fasd')
name
adf
fasd
fasd
=> {:name=>"adf", :fasd=>"fasd"}

Conclusion

We can do mix and match of all these different ways of sending params and create a very robust method. I hope you find this helpful. If I missed somthing do let me know in the comments below. Thanks for reading.