Best-practice: :symbol || 'string_literal'?

rubyonrails-talk
1

I was researching an earlier issue with rails and I stumbled across a document which mentioned something that sounded to me like "Due to a recent shift in the mind-set of the community, it is frowned upon to use a string literal in any situation which does not require text manipulation; use symbols instead." Did I interpret the info on that page correctly? Also, any further info you can give me about when I should be using literals and when to use symbols would be very much appreciated. Also, any other tips on best-practice or links to good resources about such would be rad.

-Kyle

2

I was researching an earlier issue with rails and I stumbled across a document which mentioned something that sounded to me like "Due to a recent shift in the mind-set of the community, it is frowned upon to use a string literal in any situation which does not require text manipulation; use symbols instead." Did I interpret the info on that page correctly?

No idea, since I don't know what page you're referring to, but it
sounds reasonable.

One reason to use symbols is that there is only *one* :foo, but there
are many "foo"'s. That is...

>> :foo.object_id => 146098 >> "foo".object_id => 1750540 >> :foo.object_id => 146098 >> "foo".object_id => 1734530 >> def foomethod >> :foo.object_id >> end => nil >> foomethod => 146098

Notice how the id of :foo never changes -- even inside methods? But
the id of "foo" does change.

So :foo is cheaper as there is only one in existence in the entire
program memory.

3

Josh Susser says Symbols are not pretty strings - has_many :through - Symbols are not pretty strings