I have an array of elements in Ruby

[2,4,6,3,8]

I need to remove elements with value 3 for example

How do I do that?

• ruby

I think I've figured it out:

a = [2,4,6,3,8]
a.delete(3)

Borrowing from Travis in the comments, this is a better answer:

I personally like [1, 2, 7, 4, 5] - [7] which results in => [1, 2, 4, 5] from irb

I modified his answer seeing that 3 was the third element in his example array. This could lead to some confusion for those who don't realize that 3 is in position 2 in the array.

Another option:

a = [2,4,6,3,8]

a -= [3]

which results in

=> [2, 4, 6, 8] 

I'm not sure if anyone has stated this, but Array.delete() and -= value will delete every instance of the value passed to it within the Array. In order to delete the first instance of the particular element you could do something like

arr = [1,3,2,44,5]
arr.delete_at(arr.index(44))

#=> [1,3,2,5]

There could be a simpler way. I'm not saying this is best practice, but it is something that should be recognized.

I like the -=[4] way mentioned in other answers to delete the elements whose value are 4.

But there is this way:

irb(main):419:0> [2,4,6,3,8,6].delete_if{|i|i==6}
=> [2, 4, 3, 8]
irb(main):420:0>

mentioned somewhere in "Basic Array Operations", after it mentions the map function.

Assuming you want to delete 3 by value at multiple places in an array, I think the ruby way to do this task would be to use the delete_if method:

[2,4,6,3,8,3].delete_if {|x| x == 3 } 

You can also use delete_if in removing elements in the scenario of 'array of arrays'.

Hope this resolves your query

You can simply run:

[2,4,6,3,8].delete(3)

A .delete_at(3) 3 here being the position.

Here are some benchmarks:

require 'fruity'


class Array          
  def rodrigo_except(*values)
    self - values
  end    

  def niels_except value
    value = value.kind_of?(Array) ? value : [value]
    self - value
  end
end

ARY = [2,4,6,3,8]

compare do
  soziev  { a = ARY.dup; a.delete(3);               a }
  steve   { a = ARY.dup; a -= [3];                  a }
  barlop  { a = ARY.dup; a.delete_if{ |i| i == 3 }; a }
  rodrigo { a = ARY.dup; a.rodrigo_except(3);         }
  niels   { a = ARY.dup; a.niels_except(3);           }
end

# >> Running each test 4096 times. Test will take about 2 seconds.
# >> soziev is similar to barlop
# >> barlop is faster than steve by 2x ± 1.0
# >> steve is faster than rodrigo by 4x ± 1.0
# >> rodrigo is similar to niels

And again with a bigger array containing lots of duplicates:

class Array          
  def rodrigo_except(*values)
    self - values
  end    

  def niels_except value
    value = value.kind_of?(Array) ? value : [value]
    self - value
  end
end

ARY = [2,4,6,3,8] * 1000

compare do
  soziev  { a = ARY.dup; a.delete(3);               a }
  steve   { a = ARY.dup; a -= [3];                  a }
  barlop  { a = ARY.dup; a.delete_if{ |i| i == 3 }; a }
  rodrigo { a = ARY.dup; a.rodrigo_except(3);         }
  niels   { a = ARY.dup; a.niels_except(3);           }
end

# >> Running each test 16 times. Test will take about 1 second.
# >> steve is faster than soziev by 30.000000000000004% ± 10.0%
# >> soziev is faster than barlop by 50.0% ± 10.0%
# >> barlop is faster than rodrigo by 3x ± 0.1
# >> rodrigo is similar to niels

And even bigger with more duplicates:

class Array          
  def rodrigo_except(*values)
    self - values
  end    

  def niels_except value
    value = value.kind_of?(Array) ? value : [value]
    self - value
  end
end

ARY = [2,4,6,3,8] * 100_000

compare do
  soziev  { a = ARY.dup; a.delete(3);               a }
  steve   { a = ARY.dup; a -= [3];                  a }
  barlop  { a = ARY.dup; a.delete_if{ |i| i == 3 }; a }
  rodrigo { a = ARY.dup; a.rodrigo_except(3);         }
  niels   { a = ARY.dup; a.niels_except(3);           }
end

# >> Running each test once. Test will take about 6 seconds.
# >> steve is similar to soziev
# >> soziev is faster than barlop by 2x ± 0.1
# >> barlop is faster than niels by 3x ± 1.0
# >> niels is similar to rodrigo

I improved Niels's solution

class Array          
  def except(*values)
    self - values
  end    
end

Now you can use

[1, 2, 3, 4].except(3, 4) # return [1, 2]
[1, 2, 3, 4].except(4)    # return [1, 2, 3]

You can also monkey patch it. I never understood why Ruby has an except method for Hash but not for Array:

class Array
  def except value
    value = value.kind_of(Array) ? value : [value]
    self - value
  end
end

Now you can do:

[1,3,7,"436",354,nil].except(354) #=> [1,3,7,"436",nil]

Or:

[1,3,7,"436",354,nil].except([354, 1]) #=> [3,7,"436",nil]

So when you have multiple occurrences of 3 and you want only to delete the first occurrence of 3, you can simply do some thing as below.

arr = [2, 4, 6, 3, 8, 10, 3, 12]

arr.delete_at arr.index 3

#This will modify arr as [2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 3, 12] where first occurrence of 3 is deleted. Returns the element deleted. In this case => 3.

If you also want to make this deletion operation chainable, so you can delete some item and keep on chaining operations on the resulting array, use tap:

[2, 4, 6, 3, 8].tap { |ary| ary.delete(3) }.count #=> 4

Non-destructive removal of first occurrence:

a = [2, 4, 6, 3, 8]
n = a.index 3
a.take(n)+a.drop(n+1)