Ruby Pocket Reference

Symbols

Ruby has a special object called a symbol. Symbols are like placeholders for identifiers and strings; they are always prefixed by a colon (:), such as :en and :logos. Most importantly, only one copy of the symbol is held in a single memory address, as long as the program is running. You don’t directly create a symbol by assigning a value to one. You create a symbol by calling the to_sym or intern methods on a string, or by assigning a symbol to a symbol:

name = "Brianna"
name.to_sym # => :Brianna
:Brianna.id2name # => "Brianna"
name == :Brianna.id2name # => true