Ruby-on-rails – Ruby: What is the easiest way to remove the first element from an array

To get a copy, use the clone (or dup for rails 3.1+) method:

# rails < 3.1
new_record = old_record.clone

#rails >= 3.1
new_record = old_record.dup

Then you can change whichever fields you want.

ActiveRecord overrides the built-in Object#clone to give you a new (not saved to the DB) record with an unassigned ID.
Note that it does not copy associations, so you'll have to do this manually if you need to.

Rails 3.1 clone is a shallow copy, use dup instead...

Try this:

arr = [5, 6, 7, 8]
arr.inject{ |sum, el| sum + el }.to_f / arr.size
=> 6.5

Note the .to_f, which you'll want for avoiding any problems from integer division. You can also do:

arr = [5, 6, 7, 8]
arr.inject(0.0) { |sum, el| sum + el } / arr.size
=> 6.5

You can define it as part of Array as another commenter has suggested, but you need to avoid integer division or your results will be wrong. Also, this isn't generally applicable to every possible element type (obviously, an average only makes sense for things that can be averaged). But if you want to go that route, use this:

class Array
  def sum
    inject(0.0) { |result, el| result + el }
  end

  def mean 
    sum / size
  end
end

If you haven't seen inject before, it's not as magical as it might appear. It iterates over each element and then applies an accumulator value to it. The accumulator is then handed to the next element. In this case, our accumulator is simply an integer that reflects the sum of all the previous elements.

Edit: Commenter Dave Ray proposed a nice improvement.

Edit: Commenter Glenn Jackman's proposal, using arr.inject(:+).to_f, is nice too but perhaps a bit too clever if you don't know what's going on. The :+ is a symbol; when passed to inject, it applies the method named by the symbol (in this case, the addition operation) to each element against the accumulator value.