That's mostly how I've been operating, but I don't like always breaking things down into lists. It's good for algorithms, but you tend to lose structure.

The hmap and hgrep methods seem like a nice way to do that, because when I'm putting things together, it seems like they want to go into a big anonymous structure (multi-level hash). Think of assembling JSON like things for example. In these cases I find it more natural to work with hashes, and hashes of hashes and so forth.

By the answers it seems like the shortest thing is a few lines, which is not overly long, but lacks the super terseness of map or grep. So I think that means I need to write a little function. This isn't so hard, but it does seem that map and grep are so versatile, I was wondering if there were aspects of them I was "not getting", and therefore if there were some ultra-compact expression. It seems like 3 lines is about as short as you can go.

Thanks, Roger