count vs length vs size

In Ruby, #length and #size are synonyms and both do the same thing: they tell you how many elements are in an array or hash. Technically #length is the method and #size is an alias to it.

In ActiveRecord, there are several ways to find out how many records are in an association, and there are some subtle differences in how they work.

• post.comments.count - Determine the number of elements with an SQL COUNT query. You can also specify conditions to count only a subset of the associated elements (e.g. :conditions => {:author_name => "josh"}). If you set up a counter cache on the association, #count will return that cached value instead of executing a new query.
• post.comments.length - This always loads the contents of the association into memory, then returns the number of elements loaded. Note that this won't force an update if the association had been previously loaded and then new comments were created through another way (e.g.Comment.create(...) instead of post.comments.create(...)).
• post.comments.size - This works as a combination of the two previous options. If the collection has already been loaded, it will return its length just like calling #length. If it hasn't been loaded yet, it's like calling #count.

a = { "a" => "Hello", "b" => "World" }
a.count  # 2
a.size   # 2
a.length # 2

a = [ 10, 20 ]
a.count  # 2
a.size   # 2
a.length # 2

For arrays and hashes size is an alias for length. They are synonyms and do exactly the same thing.

count is more versatile - it can take an element or predicate and count only those items that match.

> [1,2,3].count{|x| x > 2 }
=> 1

---

In the case where you don't provide a parameter to count it has basically the same effect as calling length. There can be a performance difference though.

We can see from the source code for Array that they do almost exactly the same thing. Here is the C code for the implementation of array.length:

static VALUE
rb_ary_length(VALUE ary)
{
    long len = RARRAY_LEN(ary);
    return LONG2NUM(len);
}

And here is the relevant part from the implementation of array.count:

static VALUE
rb_ary_count(int argc, VALUE *argv, VALUE ary)
{
    long n = 0;

    if (argc == 0) {
        VALUE *p, *pend;

        if (!rb_block_given_p())
            return LONG2NUM(RARRAY_LEN(ary));

        // etc..
    }
}

The code for array.count does a few extra checks but in the end calls the exact same code:LONG2NUM(RARRAY_LEN(ary)).

Hashes (source code) on the other hand don't seem to implement their own optimized version of countso the implementation from Enumerable (source code) is used, which iterates over all the elements and counts them one-by-one.

In general I'd advise using length (or its alias size) rather than count if you want to know how many elements there are altogether.