When I was recently working in one of the client projects, I had to communicate with external MariaDB server to store records from React/Rails app, that means I would get ActiveRecord hash from our app which I had to convert to pure SQL query and send it to an external server for storing. If you have worked with SQL queries previously then you must know that keys and values must be separated for insert operations like (first_name, last_name, email) (John, Doe, john@email.com) INSERT INTO users VALUES I could convert attributes to hash easily using to get the format as_json { => , => , => } "first_name" "John" "last_name" "Doe" "email" "john@email.com" But I had to extract keys and values separately so that attributes can be accurately formatted and ready for insert and update operations. Let me show you how I extracted keys and values from the hash and formatted them as required for the operations. Let’s assume we have: user = {"first_name"=>"John", "last_name"=>"Doe", "email"=>"john@email.com"} Extract single key or value If we only want email user.extract!( ).keys # [ ] # extract user.extract!( ).values # [ ] # simply user[ ] # // For key "email" "email" // For value with "email" "john@email.com" 'email' "john@email.com" Extract multiple keys or values If we want and but not first_name last_name email // keys user.extract!(*[ , ]).keys // values user.extract!(*[ , ]).values For "first_name" "last_name" # [ , ] "first_name" "last_name" For "first_name" "last_name" # [ , ] "John" "Doe" Extract all keys or values // keys .keys # ["first_name", "last_name", "email"] // . # ["John", "Doe", "john@email.com"] For user For values user values Do you know a more elegant or alternative way to extract keys and values from hashes? Please enlighten and guide us with your precious comment below if you do. This post was originally posted on . DevPost