Ruby is a dynamic and a true Object oriented language.Due to which ruby has a lot of ways to compare two objects.To be exact it has 4 different ways to compare objects that I am aware of.To understand Ruby objects and equality comparison works lets create a class. Since I have been playing a bunch of iPad games.Lets create a game object Lets get some game instances to work with.Now comparing with the == operator. As you can see creating two game object with the same title and comparing them gives you a false result. This is because the == comparator compares the object’s identity.To get the objects identity.Send the object_id message to it. Now comparing with the equal? operator. The equal? operator works the same way as the == operator.But unlike the == operator the equal? operator must never be overwritten as it is used internally by ruby to compare object identity.

The eql? operator The eql operator works a bit differently compared the above two comparators.It compares the hashes between two objects.Even though the final result tends to be similar to ==. Lastly we have the === operator. The triple equal operator is used in case statement comparison.

So now which operator do I use and when.

  1. Double Equal operator:According to ruby conventions, if you want to compare two objects which you own ,you can override the == operator to make it compare properties in your object.

    class Game attr_reader :title def initialize(title) @title = title end def ==(other) other.is_a?(self.class) && @title == other.title end end

When you try to compare 1 == 1.0 you will get true because ruby casts 1 as to a Numeric class and then compares with the 1.0.

  1. Triple Equal operator: Like double equal you can use the triple equal operator to compare two objects and also override it to get your desired result.

3.equal?: The equal? operator is used by ruby so use it carefully and never override it.

4.eql?: Like the equal? operator it is better not to override the eql operator and use it to compare both the class and equality of two objects.