Ruby Threequals

Ruby's == is pretty straightforward. From the Object class documentation:

Equality — At the Object level, == returns true only if obj and other are the same object. Typically, this method is overridden in descendant classes to provide class-specific meaning.

Some examples from the String class:

irb > 'foo' == 'foo'
 => true
irb > 'foo' == :foo
 => false
irb > 'foo' == 'bar'
 => false

The triple equals, ===, sometimes called a ‘threequals’ or ‘case equality operator’, is different (again from the Object docs):

Case Equality – For class Object, effectively the same as calling #==, but typically overridden by descendants to provide meaningful semantics in case statements.

The threequals compares the type of two arguments. One way to think about a === b is: 'does b belong in a box a’?

A few examples:

irb > String === 'foo'
 => true
irb > Array === %w(one two three)
 => true
irb > Range === (1..10)
 => true
irb > /car/ === 'carpool'
 => true

All of these evaluate false when the == operator is used.

Ruby's case statement operator uses the threequals for its control flow.

h/t Chris Erin

http://ruby-doc.org/docs/keywords/1.9/Object.html#method-i-case http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7156955/whats-the-difference-between-equal-eql-and