Hashstructor

There comes a time in every wee programmer's life (and all programmers are, for the purposes of this readme, wee or previously wee) when one must take a big blob of JSON or YAML and make it into an object. Or worse, a hierarchy of objects. This leads to lots of very manual parsing and gnashing of teeth. Some libraries, like the mildly spiffy constructor, allow you to defray some of this pain by letting you pass in hashes to build objects, but this only goes so far: no type coercion, no nested types.

Finally I got tired of this mess when building a game prototype and writing enough stupid read-in code of data files that I decided to Fix This Situation. (You can argue that I got sidetracked; I won't disagree.) After about three hours of late-night work, I'm somewhat proud to unveil Hashstructor: your one-stop shop for mangling the heck out of Ruby hashes and building neat-o object trees out of them. You can also turn them back into hashes with #to_hash--I've found this really useful for transient domain objects in message queues. The creator can create objects with validation and structure and then #to_hash them when they go into the queue, and the same can be done when you get them back out.

Hashstructor is fully documented (100% coverage in yard) and comes with a fairly exhaustive set of tests to prove that it actually does what it's supposed to do.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'hashstructor'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install hashstructor

Hashstructor is pretty easy to deal with, but it's 2:10AM as I write this and I am very tired, so I shall direct you to the fancy and/or schmancy spec folder. In test_classes you will find examples of nearly every aspect of Hashstructor, and hashstructor_spec.rb explains them with a little context.

YARD documentation is hosted at http://eropple.github.io/hashstructor .

Hashstructor is designed for Ruby 2.0 and above, but may run on Ruby 1.9.x; failure to do so is not a bug.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake rspec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/eropple/hashstructor. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.