Accessing variable names in ruby

[Todd A. Jacobs]

I found myself trying to do a bit of ruby debugging, and was going crazy
trying to figure out how to display a variable's name instead of its
value in a string. There may be a more elegant way, but I found that
symbols did what I wanted:

if $DEBUG
[:my_email, :my_resume, :my_logfile].each do |v|
$stderr.puts "DEBUG: #{v} = #{eval v.to_s}"
end
end

Is there a better way?

 

[Todd A. Jacobs]

try v.intern.to_s

That doesn't work with symbols (raises "NoMethodError: undefined method
`intern' for :my_email:Symbol" ), and just returns the value of the
variable (not the variable name) when used with a variable instead of a
symbol.

 

[Robert Klemme]

I found myself trying to do a bit of ruby debugging, and was going crazy
trying to figure out how to display a variable's name instead of its
value in a string. There may be a more elegant way, but I found that
symbols did what I wanted:

if $DEBUG
[:my_email, :my_resume, :my_logfile].each do |v|
$stderr.puts "DEBUG: #{v} = #{eval v.to_s}"
end
end

Is there a better way?

When you use %w you can easily use strings for this. I'd also use
#inspect as it is generally better for debugging purposes:

%w[my_email my_resume my_logfile].each do |v|
$stderr.puts "DEBUG: #{v} = #{eval(v).inspect}"
end if $DEBUG

Kind regards

robert