Subtly between enumerable pluck and map in Rails

Did you know that pluck was not just available in ActiveRecord? Turns out Rails added it to Enumerable so you can use it on most collections.

But wait...

Before you go and do something like this:

all("nav a").pluck(:text)

Beware that pluck's implementation does a key lookup on the object being enumerated (reference). So in this particular case because text is a method on these Capybara elements you'd need to use map

all("nav a").map(&:text)

But you could use it for things that respond to hash/key lookup syntax like:

all("nav a").pluck(:href)