FAQ: Hashes and Symbols - What's a Symbol?

This community-built FAQ covers the “What’s a Symbol?” exercise from the lesson “Hashes and Symbols”.

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This exercise can be found in the following Codecademy content:

Learn Ruby

FAQs on the exercise What’s a Symbol?

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Code:
puts “string”.object_id
puts “string”.object_id

puts :symbol.object_id
puts :symbol.object_id

Question:
Why do the “string” have different ID’s?

While there can be multiple different strings that all have the same value, there’s only one copy of any particular symbol at a given time. So here string can have multiple values, but :symbol will not have different value, Anything that starts with : is considered symbol and have unique id at a point of time.

Hey guys, do you know what does the ID number refer to? I mean technically. Thanks in advance :smiley:

The value is a reference to the address in memory where that object is stored