How to implement Enums in Ruby?

Two ways. Symbols (:foo notation) or constants (FOO notation).

Symbols are appropriate when you want to enhance readability without littering code with literal strings.

postal_code[:minnesota] = "MN"
postal_code[:new_york] = "NY"

Constants are appropriate when you have an underlying value that is important. Just declare a module to hold your constants and then declare the constants within that.

module Foo
  BAR = 1
  BAZ = 2
  BIZ = 4
end
 
flags = Foo::BAR | Foo::BAZ # flags = 3

Added 2021-01-17

If you are passing the enum value around (for example, storing it in a database) and you need to be able to translate the value back into the symbol, there's a mashup of both approaches

COMMODITY_TYPE = {
  currency: 1,
  investment: 2,
}

def commodity_type_string(value)
  COMMODITY_TYPE.key(value)
end

COMMODITY_TYPE[:currency]

This approach inspired by andrew-grimm's answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/5332950/13468

I'd also recommend reading through the rest of the answers here since there are a lot of ways to solve this and it really boils down to what it is about the other language's enum that you care about

The most idiomatic way to do this is to use symbols. For example, instead of:

enum {
  FOO,
  BAR,
  BAZ
}

myFunc(FOO);

...you can just use symbols:

# You don't actually need to declare these, of course--this is
# just to show you what symbols look like.
:foo
:bar
:baz

my_func(:foo)

This is a bit more open-ended than enums, but it fits well with the Ruby spirit.

Symbols also perform very well. Comparing two symbols for equality, for example, is much faster than comparing two strings.

It all depends how you use Java or C# enums. How you use it will dictate the solution you'll choose in Ruby.

Try the native Set type, for instance:

>> enum = Set['a', 'b', 'c']
=> #<Set: {"a", "b", "c"}>
>> enum.member? "b"
=> true
>> enum.member? "d"
=> false
>> enum.add? "b"
=> nil
>> enum.add? "d"
=> #<Set: {"a", "b", "c", "d"}>

Someone went ahead and wrote a ruby gem called Renum. It claims to get the closest Java/C# like behavior. Personally I'm still learning Ruby, and I was a little shocked when I wanted to make a specific class contain a static enum, possibly a hash, that it wasn't exactly easily found via google.

Symbols is the ruby way. However, sometimes one need to talk to some C code or something or Java that expose some enum for various things.

#server_roles.rb
module EnumLike

  def EnumLike.server_role
    server_Symb=[ :SERVER_CLOUD, :SERVER_DESKTOP, :SERVER_WORKSTATION]
    server_Enum=Hash.new
    i=0
    server_Symb.each{ |e| server_Enum[e]=i; i +=1}
    return server_Symb,server_Enum
  end

end

This can then be used like this

require 'server_roles'

sSymb, sEnum =EnumLike.server_role()

foreignvec[sEnum[:SERVER_WORKSTATION]]=8

This is can of course be made abstract and you can roll our own Enum class

Most people use symbols (that's the :foo_bar syntax). They're sort of unique opaque values. Symbols don't belong to any enum-style type so they're not really a faithful representation of C's enum type but this is pretty much as good as it gets.

irb(main):016:0> num=[1,2,3,4]
irb(main):017:0> alph=['a','b','c','d']
irb(main):018:0> l_enum=alph.to_enum
irb(main):019:0> s_enum=num.to_enum
irb(main):020:0> loop do
irb(main):021:1* puts "#{s_enum.next} - #{l_enum.next}"
irb(main):022:1> end

Output:

1 - a
2 - b
3 - c
4 - d

Try the inum. https://github.com/alfa-jpn/inum

class Color < Inum::Base
  define :RED
  define :GREEN
  define :BLUE
end

Color::RED 
Color.parse('blue') # => Color::BLUE
Color.parse(2)      # => Color::GREEN

see more https://github.com/alfa-jpn/inum#usage