On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 3:45 PM, James Byrne <li...@ruby-forum.com> wrote: > This is a request for a programming technique: > > Given > > class Mymodel < ActiveRecord::Base > end > > my_instance = Mymodel.new > > If I am given a string representation of an attribute "xxx" what is the > most elegant way of passing that string to my_instance to retrieve its > value? This is probably a common idiom, given what Rails does, but I > cannot seem to find its code in the rails gem at the moment. > > So, if anyone knows hoe to do this off the cuff I would appreciate it. > An example of the intended use of this is > > def table_compare(table1, table2, array_of_attributes) do |t1, t2, > aon| > tint = t1.column_names & t2.column_names > tfin = tint & aon > tfin.each do |column| > return false if t1.column <> t2.column > end > return tfin #could be nil > end > > I want to convert the string value of the column variable into the > attribute name to obtain the value of that attribute.
I'm assuming you want to treat your model instance like a hash: m = MyModel.new :name => "foo" m["name"] # => "foo" http://www.railsbrain.com/api/rails-2.2.2/doc/index.html?a=M001972&name=[] On a different note, how about some better variable names? -- Zach Dennis http://www.continuousthinking.com http://www.mutuallyhuman.com _______________________________________________ rspec-users mailing list rspec-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users
