rolandobrown/count-elements

count the elements in an array and return a hash with their counts

Iteration and Building Hashes: Element Count

Objectives

1. Practice iterating over an array
2. Practice building hashes within an iteration

Instructions

Fork and clone this lab. You'll be coding your solution in count_elements.rb. The count_elements method takes in an argument of an array and returns a hash of key/value pairs in which the keys are the original string elements of the array and their associated values are a count of how many times they appeared in the array.

Here's an example of ideal behavior:

animals = ['tortoise', 'aye-aye', 'honey badger', 'aye-aye', 'tortoise', 'tortoise']
count_elements(animals)
# => {'tortoise' => 3, 'aye-aye' => 2, 'honey badger' => 1}

Tips:

• Start by setting an empty hash equal to a variable, new_hash. Then, as you iterate over the array, add key/value pairs to new_hash. That way, you can return new_hash at the end of your method.
• As you iterate through the array, you will need to turn the string array elements into string hash keys. First, check to see if a particular key is already present in the hash. If it is, increment the value that is it's count. If it isn't, add it as a key to your hash with a value of 1.
• Use the += method to increment the count that constitutes the value of each key every time you encounter another repititon of that string in the array you are iterating over.