After the wackiness of the past couple of weeks — some travel to see family, followed by a busy week of tech events including DemoCamp 18, Damian Conway’s presentation, FAILCamp and RubyFringe — I’m happy to return to Enumerating Enumerable, the article series in which I attempt to do a better job at documenting Ruby’s Enumerable module than Ruby-Doc.org does.

In this article, the eighth in the series, I’m going to cover a method introduced in Ruby 1.9: drop_while.

I’m going through the Enumerable’s methods in alphabetical order. If you missed any of the earlier articles, I’ve listed them all below:

1. all?
2. any?
3. collect / map
4. count
5. cycle
6. detect / find
7. drop

Enumerable#drop_while Quick Summary

Enumerable#drop_while and Arrays

When used on an array, drop_while returns a copy of the array created by going through the original array’s items in order, dropping elements until it encounters the an element that does not meet the condition. The resulting array is basically a copy of the original array, starting at the first element that doesn’t meet the condition in the block.

As in many cases, things become clearer with some examples:

# In Canada, and in fact in all but 2 countries in the world,
# the weather report gives temperatures in Celsius!
temperatures = [28, 25, 30, 22, 27]
=> [28, 25, 30, 22, 27]

# The block returns true for the FIRST two elements,
# and false for the third.
# So drop_while returns an array like the original,
# but starting at the third element.
temperatures.drop_while {|temperature| temperature < 30}
=> [30, 22, 27]

# The block returns false for the first element,
# so drop_while returns an array like the original,
# starting at the first element
# (in other words, a copy of the original).
temperatures.drop_while {|temperature| temperature < 28}
=> [28, 25, 30, 22, 27]

Enumerable#drop_while and Hashes

When used on a hash, drop_while effectively:

• Creates an array based on the hash, with each element in the hash represented as a two-element array where the first element contains the key and the second element containing the corresponding value, then
• goes through each element in the array, dropping elements until it encounters the first element that doesn’t meet the condition in the block. The resulting array is an array of two-element arrays, starting at the first element that doesn’t meet the condition in the block.

Once again, examples will make this all clear:

# We're basically taking the array from the previous example
# and dressing it up in a hash
city_temperatures = {"New York" => 28, \
                     "Toronto" => 25, \
                     "Washington" => 30, \
                     "Montreal" => 22, \
                     "Boston" => 27}
=> {"New York"=>28, "Toronto"=>25, "Washington"=>30,
"Montreal"=>22, "Boston"=>27}

# The block returns true for the FIRST two elements,
# and false for the third.
# So drop_while returns an array based on the hash,
# but starting at the third element
# (and, of course, the key-value pairs turned into
# two-element arrays).
city_temperatures.drop_while {|city_temperature| city_temperature[1] < 30}
=> [["Washington", 30], ["Montreal", 22], ["Boston", 27]]

# This is a more readable version of the line above
city_temperatures.drop_while {|city, temperature| temperature < 30}
=> [["Washington", 30], ["Montreal", 22], ["Boston", 27]]

# The block returns false for the first element,
# so drop_while returns an array based on the hash,
# starting at the first element
# (in other words, an array based on the original hash,
# with key-value pairs turned into two-element arrays).
city_temperatures.drop_while {|city,temperature| temperature < 28}
=> [["New York", 28], ["Toronto", 25], ["Washington", 30],
["Montreal", 22], ["Boston", 27]]

Enumerable#drop_while’s Evil Twin, Enumerable#take_while

I’ll cover take_while in detail in a later installment, but for now, an example should suffice:

city_temperatures.drop_while {|city_temperature| city_temperature[1] < 30}
=> [["Washington", 30], ["Montreal", 22], ["Boston", 27]]

city_temperatures.take_while {|city_temperature| city_temperature[1] < 30}
=> [["New York", 28], ["Toronto", 25]]