Three Little Hacks

As I’ve missed my last 2 posts, I’m going to now regale you with not 1, not 2, but 3 (three!) of my favorite little hacks ruby hacks.

Digg

Do you have a deeply nested structures you want 1 value from deep inside? Don’t care if the path is broken? Use digg! I especially love this to get deeply nested data out of a JSON response.

module Digg
  def digg(*path)
    path.inject(self) do |memo, key|
      (memo.respond_to?(:[]) && (memo[key] || {})) || break
    end
  end
end

Array.send :include, Digg
Hash.send :include, Digg

# Use as
some_complex_json_rsponse.digg('preview', 'thumbnail', 0, 'id')

_{(Would you believe there is no digging related emoji? Have a 📯 instead.)}

Symbol respond_to

Sometimes we switch on classes, you’ve seen this before right?

case a_thing
  #...
when Array, Hash
  #...
when String
  #...
end

Not only is that ugly, but we are basing our behavior on classes, instead of behavior. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could test for methods? Well we can!

case a_thing
when ->(x) { x.respond_to? :fetch }
  #...
when ->(x) { x.respond_to? :split }
  #...
end

Ugh… That looks horrible 😷. Let’s improve that with:

module SymbolRespondTo
  def ~@
    -> (o) { o.respond_to?(self) }
  end
end

Symbol.send(:include, SymbolRespondTo)

Adding a simple unary method on symbol gives us a great looking switch. ✨

case a_thing
when ~:fetch
  #...
when ~:split
  #...
end

If I could love code, this would be the code I love. 💞💗💖

Better to_s

Often times it makes sense for the to_s value of an object to be the name or the title of the person or thing. So out of shear laziness 😫 I wrote this little hack.

module DefaultToS
  def to_s
    case self
    when ~:name then name
    when ~:title then title
    else super
    end
  end
end

ActiveRecord::Base.prepend(:to_s)

It might be a hack, but I like it.

Do you have your favorite hacks? What do you think of mine? Let me know below!