Your item variable holds Array instance (in [hash_key, hash_value] format), so it doesn’t expect Symbol in [] method.
This is how you could do it using Hash#each:
def format(hash)
output = Hash.new
hash.each do |key, value|
output[key] = cleanup(value)
end
output
end
or, without this:
def format(hash)
output = hash.dup
output[:company_name] = cleanup(output[:company_name])
output[:street] = cleanup(output[:street])
output
end