«
»

Ruby min/max

I wondered why Ruby seemed to be missing min() and max() functions, which of course are very useful.
Turns out you’re supposed to use Enumerable.min and Enumerable.max like so:

irb(main):020:0> [2, 1].min
=> 1

This entry was posted on Friday, November 10th, 2006 at 3:48 am and is filed under Ruby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to “Ruby min/max”

  1. Jeremy Roush Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 2:36 am

    Old post, but useful. Much appreciated!

  2. Rob Morris Says:
    May 9th, 2008 at 9:11 am

    I find the “official” version very counter-intuitive. My first thought, when coding up a comparison, is not to create a transient array.

    If you’re like me, throw this into your environment.rb or similar init code:

    module Math
    def self.min(a,b)
    a = b ? a : b
    end
    end

    Now you can do Math.min(1,2) and be a little more clear on what you’re doing. Cheers!

  3. Rob Morris Says:
    May 9th, 2008 at 9:12 am

    Sorry, got garbled, here’s another attempt:

    module Math
    def self.min(a,b)
    a <= b ? a : b
    end

    def self.max(a,b)
    a >= b ? a : b
    end
    end

  4. Raoul Duke Says:
    February 20th, 2009 at 8:15 pm

    @module Math

    hm, does that properly handle floating point? like, is there any weirdness with negative zero?