Array to Hash Ruby

All answers assume the starting array is unique. OP did not specify how to handle arrays with duplicate entries, which result in duplicate keys.

Let's look at:

a = ["item 1", "item 2", "item 3", "item 4", "item 1", "item 5"]

You will lose the item 1 => item 2 pair as it is overridden bij item 1 => item 5:

Hash[*a]
=> {"item 1"=>"item 5", "item 3"=>"item 4"}

All of the methods, including the reduce(&:merge!) result in the same removal.

It could be that this is exactly what you expect, though. But in other cases, you probably want to get a result with an Array for value instead:

{"item 1"=>["item 2", "item 5"], "item 3"=>["item 4"]}

The naïve way would be to create a helper variable, a hash that has a default value, and then fill that in a loop:

result = Hash.new {|hash, k| hash[k] = [] } # Hash.new with block defines unique defaults.
a.each_slice(2) {|k,v| result[k] << v }
a
=> {"item 1"=>["item 2", "item 5"], "item 3"=>["item 4"]}

It might be possible to use assoc and reduce to do above in one line, but that becomes much harder to reason about and read.