Rails 6 adds support of symbol keys

Rails 6 added support of symbol keys with ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess#assoc.

Please note that documentation of ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess#assoc in Rails 5.2 shows that ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess#assoc works with symbol keys but it doesn't.

In Rails 6, ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess implements a hash where string and symbol keys are considered to be the same.

Before Rails 6, HashWithIndifferentAccess#assoc used to work with just string keys.

Let's checkout how it works.

Rails 5.2

Let's create an object of ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess and call assoc on that object.

1>> info = { name: 'Mark', email: '[email protected]' }.with_indifferent_access
2
3=> {"name"=>"Mark", "email"=>"[email protected]"}
4
5>> info.assoc(:name)
6
7=> nil
8
9>> info.assoc('name')
10
11=> ["name", "Mark"]
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We can see that assoc does not work with symbol keys with ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess in Rails 5.2.

Rails 6.0.0.beta2

Now, let's call assoc on the same hash in Rails 6 with both string and symbol keys.

1>> info = { name: 'Mark', email: '[email protected]' }.with_indifferent_access
2
3=> {"name"=>"Mark", "email"=>"[email protected]"}
4
5>> info.assoc(:name)
6
7=> ["name", "Mark"]
8
9>> info.assoc('name')
10
11=> ["name", "Mark"]
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As we can see, assoc works perfectly fine with both string and symbol keys with ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess in Rails 6.

Here is the relevant pull request.