Largest Value Nested Hash

I came across this question on the Ruby Reddit the other day:

How do I select the largest key: value pair in a nested hash?

The problem specifies a hash of data, which I’ll include in full in the gist containing my solution. Omitting data we don’t care about, and removing repetitions, the hash is structured like this:

game_hash = {
    home: {
      players: {
        player1: {
          shoe_size: 16,
          rebounds: 12,
          ...
        },
        player2: {
          ...
        },
        ...
      },
      away: {
        players: {
          player1: {
            shoe_size: 18,
            rebounds: 1,
            ...
          },
          ...
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

The task is to:

return the number of rebounds associated with the person with the highest shoe size

So, out of all the players, we need to find the one with the highest shoe size, and then return the value of rebounds for that player.

For both home and away, players is a hash where the keys are player1, player2, ...

We only care about the lists of player hashes, so we can get our full list of all players from the values of the players hashes, like this:

players = game_hash[:home][:players].values +
  game_hash[:home][:away][:players].values

Note: I think the fact that the away hash is contained inside game_hash[:home] is a mistake, but that’s the way the hash was structured in the original question, so that’s what I’m working with.

We can find the player with the highest shoe size by sorting all the players into ascending shoe_size order, and taking the last one:

players
  .sort {|a,b| a[:shoe_size] <=> b[:shoe_size]}
  .last

The we just return the value of rebounds for that player.

Putting it all together, it looks like this:

def rebounds_for_highest_shoe_size_player(game_hash)
  players = game_hash[:home][:players].values +
    game_hash[:home][:away][:players].values

  bigfoot = players
    .sort {|a,b| a[:shoe_size] <=> b[:shoe_size]}
    .last

  bigfoot[:rebounds]
end

game_hash = {
  # ...lots of data goes here...
}

puts rebounds_for_highest_shoe_size_player(game_hash)

My solution, including the full data hash, is here.