Data::Dumper Request

Ruby
#1

Hiya

I know we can use JSON, YAML, Marshal etc for representation of the
data.

Personally I find the above solutions clunky.

I would do the job if I could (Still learning Ruby), but im hoping with
the spirit of open source and communities, I would like to plead with
community for someone to please release a gem like perls Data::Dumper.

Hope someone would be so kind as to give me request some thought.

Kind Regards
Brent C.

#2

Brent C. wrote:

Hiya

I know we can use JSON, YAML, Marshal etc for representation of the
data.

Personally I find the above solutions clunky.

I would do the job if I could (Still learning Ruby), but im hoping with
the spirit of open source and communities, I would like to plead with
community for someone to please release a gem like perls Data::Dumper.

you can try

print a.inspect

or

p a # same thing

or

require ‘pp’
pp a

Do these scratch your itch?
-r

#3

On 8/5/10, Brent C. [email protected] wrote:

Hope someone would be so kind as to give me request some thought.
I wrote a gem called Ron (note capitalization; if you use lowercase
spelling, you’ll get something else) which serializes ruby data
structures as ruby code which can be eval’d to get back the original
data. Seems to be exactly what you’re asking for.

There’s also amarshal, which serializes ruby data as ruby code that
reconstructs it, but it’s not as declarative (it emits a series of
statements which reconstruct the object, instead of a single
expression) and therefore (IMNSHO) not as pretty.

#4

On Thursday, August 05, 2010 03:07:39 am Brent C. wrote:

Hiya

I know we can use JSON, YAML, Marshal etc for representation of the data.

Personally I find the above solutions clunky.

How so?

I mainly used Dumper in Perl for two reasons:

  • I wasn’t aware of easy options for JSON/YAML/etc for storing data.
  • I wanted to see what was actually going on in my objects.

So I’m curious, because I prefer the above solutions to something
executable
for the purposes of data storage and transfer – the only place I’d
prefer
this is when #inspect isn’t doing a good enough job for investigating
stuff in
irb.