Setting Your Own Default

You don't have to settle for nil as a default value, however. If you create your hash using the Hash.new syntax, you can specify a default like so:

my_hash = Hash.new("Trady Blix")

Now if you try to access a nonexistent key in my_hash, you'll get "Trady Blix" as a result.

You can always read more hashy goodness in the official Ruby documentation