I'm building a table of data. At first, the rows of this table are most easily filled by key / value so I use a hash
a = Hash(Int32, Symbol).new
a[1] = :one
Once that's done, it's more convenient to work with an array (I need to sort the data for example). Easy enough:
a.to_a # => [{1, :one}]
But now I'm discovering that for my formatter to work properly (multi-page table, using latex) things just make more sense if I can store another data type in that array, for example, a string. But it's too late! The type of the array is fixed; it won't admit a string.
a << "str" # => ERROR!
The solution I've come up with so far doesn't seem very elegant:
a = Hash(Int32, Symbol).new
a[1] = :one
arr = Array(String | Tuple(Int32, Symbol)).new
a.each do |k,v|
arr << {k,v}
end
arr << "str" # no problem now
Is there a more "Crystal" / elegant way?
Just use to_a with as it can be used to cast to a "bigger" type as the docs call it
a = Hash(Int32, Symbol).new
a[1] = :one
arr = a.to_a.map { |x| x.as(String | Tuple(Int32, Symbol)) }
arr << "str" # [{1, :one}, "str"]