I feel like I’m often wanting to count occurrences of items in an array (Rails has its own special case as well), and I’m always trying to do it the “long way.”

I finally stumbled upon this answer on StackOverflow that details the version-by-version options:

• Ruby 2.7+ use .tally directly on the array:

irb(main):006:0> %i{a b c c d c e b a a a b d}.tally<br>=> {:a=>4, :b=>3, :c=>3, :d=>2, :e=>1}

• Ruby 2.4+ use Object#itself on the elements with Enumerable#group_by and Hash#transform_values to call Array#count on the items.

irb(main):011:0> %i{a b c c d c e b a a a b d}.group_by(&:itself).transform_values(&:count)
=> {:a=>4, :b=>3, :c=>3, :d=>2, :e=>1}

• Ruby 2.2+ use Enumerable#map and Array#to_h to accomplish the same transformation as in Ruby 2.4+

irb(main):012:0> %i{a b c c d c e b a a a b d}.group_by(&:itself).map { |k,v| [k, v.length] }.to_h<br>=> {:a=>4, :b=>3, :c=>3, :d=>2, :e=>1}

The Rails Exception

It’s a pretty common temptation, especially once you start thinking in terms of the list of items you want to count, to try to use a pure Ruby solution for things. But what if your source is from the your database?

The key here is the database. You probably don’t want to load all of the records from the database just to count them using the above methods, and SQL has a GROUP BY clause which is just called .group.

irb(main):013:0> Entry.group(:user_id).count
D, [2021-08-26T02:49:43.996743 #4] DEBUG -- :    (1.2ms)  SELECT COUNT(*) AS count_all, "entries"."user_id" AS entries_user_id FROM "entries" GROUP BY "entries"."user_id"
=> {1=>231, 4=>15, 2=>2}

This output is tallying entries by what User (via user_id) entered them. More importantly, the SQL used did the counts within the database without retrieving any data contained into the application except what was counted. (This used to be a pun on the :what column in the entries table, but apparently we’re not there with proper rendering and cutting and pasting of emojis between apps and OSes and well, I enter emoji as part of my entries in this app.