Overriding the == operator in Ruby

Question

According to the docs, Array.include? uses the == comparison on objects. I come from Java where such things are (usually) done with .equals() which is easy to override for a particular object.

How can I override == in Ruby to allow me to specify the behaviour of Array.include? for my particular object?

Answer 1

In Ruby == is just a method (with some syntax sugar on top allowing you to write foo == bar instead of foo.==(bar)) and you override == just like you would any other method:

class MyClass
  def ==(other_object)
    # return true if self is equal to other_object, false otherwise
  end
end