thanks.. I did read a lot about the difference between symbols and strings. I have another question here regarding the internal workings of rails and how it uses symbols. I am following the pragmatic programmers book on rails developing the depot application. Here I declare a scaffold line_item with two integers to hold the relationship between the product and the cart. In the cart controller- I use the symbol ':line_items', no where did I declare or even tell the universe there would be some symbol to denote a line_item. Is this how rails works? a default symbol for models that could be used to store the objects for that model to be used in controllers?? If someone could link me to a blog post explaining this rails character, I'll be really happy.
Thanks Arun On Oct 16, 6:22 pm, Frederick Cheung <[email protected]> wrote: > On 16 Oct, 23:01, Arun Srini <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I was trying to write a wrapper for number_to_currency to return > > currency in pounds. I used a helper class to do this. > > > def number_to_pounds(amt) > > number_to_currency(amt, :unit => "£") > > end > > > This works fine, but I am trying to understand why I can't use a > > symbol to pass the values. I thought symbols were like pointers. (you > > now know I am a newbie). > > A symbol is an interned string - :foo is a literal much like 'foo', [] > or 3: it clearly does not make sense to declare a function with the > first argument being any sort of > literalhttp://blog.hasmanythrough.com/2008/4/19/symbols-are-not-pretty-strings > has some good stuff about symbols > > Fred > > > > > def number_to_pounds(:amt) > > number_to_currency(:amt, :unit => "£") > > end > > > Note - amt is not the name of the variable my view works on, it is > > price, so I tried the symbol :price, it wouldn't work either. I am > > googling to learn about the symbols. Any link for that would be really > > helpful. > > > Thanks -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.
