DRY Ruby Initialization with Hash Argument
- by ktex
I find myself using hash arguments to constructors quite a bit, especially when writing DSLs for configuration or other bits of API that the end user will be exposed to. What I end up doing is something like the following:
class Example
PROPERTIES = [:name, :age]
PROPERTIES.each { |p| attr_reader p }
def initialize(args)
PROPERTIES.each do |p|
self.instance_variable_set "@#{p}", args[p] if not args[p].nil?
end
end
end
Is there no more idiomatic way to achieve this? The throw-away constant and the symbol to string conversion seem particularly egregious.