On 25 Aug 2010, at 19:04, Adam Lassek wrote: > Okay, that's what I needed to know. So this convention is limited to > encoding nesting relationships for Hashes, denoting Array values, and > it apparently originated from PHP. Still looking for the proper term > for this convention, but that's good enough for now.
The concept of parsing parameters into a 'deep hash' based on field names in square brackets was already present in the initial commit of Rails: http://github.com/rails/rails/blob/db045dbbf60b53dbe013ef25554fd013baf88134/actionpack/lib/action_controller/cgi_ext/cgi_methods.rb#L32 As mentioned earlier, Rack adopted this convention from Rails before its 1.0 release: http://groups.google.com/group/rack-devel/browse_thread/thread/732e2c1e014bde30/4ee0135df7767f17 In this context of Rack, the common term for this seems to be 'nested parameter parsing'. The suggestion that the idea comes from PHP is probably correct, given that DHH was working in PHP before starting Rails. PHP parses parameters with names like person[address][city] into PHP's equivalent of nested hashes, multidimensional associative arrays, and in that community the concept seems to go by some variation of 'GET/POST multi-dimensional parameters'. As a bit of history, this deep hashing was added for PHP 4.0 beta 3 back in 1999: http://svn.php.net/viewvc?view=revision&revision=12991 in response to this bug: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=279 But the basic idea of using 'foo[bar]' and 'foo[]' as parameter names in order to get a single-level associative or indexed array seems to have been around from at least as far back as PHP 2 in 1996: http://svn.php.net/viewvc/archived/phpfi/trunk/src/type.c?view=markup&pathrev=2#l47 where it's included with little fanfare and no specific name. No idea if this was in turn lifted from somewhere else -- if anywhere, it'd most likely be from Perl CGI conventions from around that period. Chris -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.
