Ruby, Struct, OpenStruct, hashes

10 Oct 2009

An interesting Ruby example of an easy way to setup classes that are really just for passing around data using Struct – essentially a neat wrapper around a hash of values:

class Node < Struct.new( :level, :tag, :data, :refid )
  def initialize( line=nil )
    ...various mungings of line omitted...
    super level, tag.downcase, data, refid
  end
end

Now I can do stuff like:

node = Node.new( line )
print node.level

rather than

node = {}
...various munging of data into node hash...
print node[:value]

Not earth-shattering, but nice. See also ri Struct, ri OpenStruct. From Pragmattic Programmers’ Best of Ruby Quiz