How do I see if a Ruby symbol has already been defined?

Your question seems a little odd. Can you pastie the code you’re looking at with some comments?

@phoenyx:

Ah ha! Your little nudge helped me figure things out. This is yet another problem with learning Ruby through capistrano.

Cap has a set(symbol, arg) method (like set :foo, “bar”) which I naïvely thought was setting the value of the symbol. In reality, it’s creating a hash of symbols => values behind the scenes. Thank you!

The Symbol class has a static array of all the defined Symbols. The catch here is that if you were to do something like Symbol.all_symbols.include?(:fluther) the symbol for :fluther is created, added to the symbols table and then returned in the array you’re checking against so you will always get true.

To get around this you can use any? on the array checking for the string representation of your symbol:
Symbol.all_symbols.any? { |sym| sym.to_s == “fluther” }

Using this as an opportunity to ask for smaller fixed-width fonts and block code formatting markup in answers :)