Confused with Ruby's <=> operator

Question

I am confused with Ruby's <=> operator. How does it differ from == or ===? Any comprehensive examples/use case? Thanks.

Cartridge

Answer 1

It's called the 'spaceship' operator. More info: What is the Ruby <=> (spaceship) operator? and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_operator

Dalury

how about in this code snippet, this confused me the most. assuming a = [ "d", "a", "e", "c", "b" ] how does this work, exactly? a.sort {|x,y| y <=> x } – Cartridge

Answer 2

<=> is the combined comparison operator. it returns 0 if LHS equals RHS, 1 if LHS is greater than the RHS and -1 if LHS is less than RHs

Northwestwards

Answer 3

== will NOT work in sort for example

[3,5,6,2,7].sort{|x,y| x <=>y }

== returns Boolean
<=> returns Fixnum (-1,0,1)

Shing

I'm assuming -1 is the same as false, and 1 is the same as true. But how does it work in this example? – Hypallage