3.1 Using the API

Greatest class of all time

Pretty much. The Array class in Ruby has over 100 public methods. We'll go through a bunch of these and move on to some real world applications in the penultimate sections.
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Starting off with the method count we used above.

count used without any arguments acts like the size or length methods, which return the number of elements present in the array.

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count also takes in a single object argument and returns the count of the array for which elements equal to that object.
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count also takes in a block and returns the number of elements in the array for which the block results to true. Find out the number of even numbers in this array.

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The index method returns the index of the object specified. If a block is given it returns the index of the first element for which the block results to true.
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The flatten method returns a one-dimensional array representation of the array. It recursively picks out all elements from the inner-arrays and lays them out in the outermost array.
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You can also restrict the number of levels flatten will jump in to.
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The compact method returns a new array with all the nil elements removed.
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Write a method that counts the number of elements of the array that is being passed in, only if the index of the number 42 in the one-dimensional representation of the array is 5.

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The zip method expects variable number of arguments and returns an array of arrays that contain corresponding elements from each array. That is, an element-wise merge with the original array.
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If the elements of the array arguments passed to zip aren't equal to the array it's being called on, then it assigns nil to the faulty combination in the sequence.

slice is same as using the literal [] form for extracting subarrays.

It accepts an index, like array[2] or a Range, like array[2..7]

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join is useful for joining all the array elements into a string. You can add a separator between by specifying it as a String argument.
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If you notice, join only applies the separator between two elements, hence sparing the last element. This makes join really convenient for sanitizing information to be displayed.

Write a method that takes an array argument, slices off the last two elements and returns a string of those two elements separated by "|"

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shift removes the first element of the array and returns it. Shifts the rest of the array towards left, such that the second element becomes the first element, the third element becomes the second one and so on.

You can also specify an optional argument -- shift(n) that will remove and return an array of the first n elements.

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unshift takes a variable number of arguments and adds them to the beginning of the array.
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pack returns a packed string of the array elements converted into appropriate binary sequences. There are quite a few directives you can specify for this, use this table for reference.

The U directive converts to UTF-8 characters. 177 and 8978 are code-points for the characters ± and ? respectively.

The directives depends on the number of array elements. We specify U twice because we have two elements. You can use * to collect all the elements.

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