From: Brent Clark on
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 Clark


From: Roger Pack on
Brent Clark 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
--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

From: Caleb Clausen on
On 8/5/10, Brent Clark <brentgclarklist(a)gmail.com> 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.
>
> 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.

From: David Masover on
On Thursday, August 05, 2010 03:07:39 am Brent Clark 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.