Accessing elements in a ruby array

Question

I have been playing around with the projects on learnstreet but I sort of noticed something intresting about the way that they access elements in an array and was hoping to get some clarification. To access the first element in an array, I know that I can do something like

a = [2,4,5,6,7] a[0] output=> 2

However on the learnstreet site they access the first element by doing something like

a = [2,4,5,6,7] a[0,1] output => 2

My speculations might be that they are using an older version of ruby that requires that you that. Correct me if I am wrong, am just curious to why it was done that way.

Actually to verify this, I went a step further and tried it in pry but I noticed that using their approach only returned the first element of the array.

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My version of ruby is => ruby 1.9.3p327 (2012-11-10 revision 37606) [x86_64-darwin12.2.0]

Instead of speculating, perhaps reading the documentation for Array would have answered your questions. — the Tin Man
– the Tin Man, Commented Apr 17, 2013 at 2:28

squiguy · Accepted Answer · 2013-04-17 01:58:08Z

That is just another way of grabbing the first index saying:

a[0, 1]

Start at the 0 index and grab a slice of length one. This is useful for grabbing a "chunk" or "slice" of the array. Typically, when only involving a certain item of the array, it is clearer to use the single index version. Namely a[0].

See here for more clarification.

Kishore Mohan · Accepted Answer · 2013-04-17 10:59:23Z

The best of grabbing the n number of index values

a[0..1]

It will return 0 index to index 1 eg:- a = [2,4,5,6,7]

 a[0..1] output => [2,4]

It will be neat and clean but it will return the value in array not in string.

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