Many Paths to the Same Summit

Remember, there are always many ways of accomplishing something in Ruby. Converting strings to symbols is no different!

Besides using .to_sym, you can also use .intern. This will internalize the string into a symbol and works just like .to_sym:

"hello".intern
# ==> :hello

When you're looking at someone else's code, you might see .to_sym or .intern (or both!) when converting strings to symbols.