How do you access the symbol table in Ruby?
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20-08-2019 - |
Question
Is there a way to access everything in the symbol table in Ruby? I want to be able to serialize or otherwise save the current state of a run of a program. To do this, it seems I need to be able to iterate over all the variables in scope.
Solution
I think he comes from a perl background , and that he would like to obtain all the variables defined in a script and serialize them . This way , when he'll load the file , he'll get them back . I'm still searching about how to get a list of the variables , but serialization will be made using Marshal.dump and reading them back will be made with Marshal.load . I'll edit the post once I find out how to get a list of all defined variables .
EDIT : found it!
You can get a list of all variables by calling these methods :
local_variables
global_variables
And if you haven't already got your serialization code , I would suggest something like this:
- create a class or a Struct instance that holds a variable name and the value of the variable and add them in an array :
local_variables.each {|var| my_array << MyVarObject.new(var,eval(var)) } # eval is used to get the value of the variable
and then serialize the array :
data = Marshal.dump(my_array)
File.open("myfile.ser","w") do |file|
file.puts data
end
OTHER TIPS
If I have understood your question properly - that you would like to see all the symbols in your program then the following should do the trick:
puts Symbol.all_symbols.inspect
The “all_symbols” class method will return an Array of every Symbol currently in the program.
I don't believe there is, but you could always use marshall dump/load.