Assignment

Once you've accessed elements in an array, you can reassign them to new values. The assignment of array elements uses the same syntax as variable assignment. If you're feeling blasphemous, you can make your array of Game of Thrones characters include characters from another television show:

blasphemous_characters = ["Robb", "Sansa", "Arya", "Bran", "Rickon"]
blasphemous_characters[0] = "Rick"
blasphemous_characters #=> ["Rick", "Sansa", "Arya", "Bran", "Rickon"]
blasphemous_characters[3..-1] = "Morty", "Snuffles" # this is called multiple assignment
blasphemous_characters #=> ["Rick", "Sansa", "Arya", "Morty", "Snuffles"]

Try running the code. (Click the run button.)

You can even assign elements to valueless array indices:

blasphemous_characters = ["Robb", "Sansa", "Arya", "Bran", "Rickon"]
# because arrays are zero-indexed, the index blasphemous_characters.length (5) doesn't have a value
blasphemous_characters[blasphemous_characters.length] = "Morty"
blasphemous_characters #=> ["Robb", "Sansa", "Arya", "Bran", "Rickon", "Morty"]
blasphemous_characters[8] = "Rick"

# The Ruby interpreter fills in the empty indices with nil
blasphemous_characters #=> ["Robb", "Sansa", "Arya", "Bran", "Rickon", "Morty", nil, nil, "Rick"]

Try running the code. (Click the run button.)

Note that assigning "Morty" to blasphemous_characters[blasphemous_characters.length] added an element to the end of the array (to an index that didn't have a value previously), thereby increasing the array's length by one.