Question

I am trying out the geocoder gem and looking to acceess the viewport results.

Being new to Ruby is there a better way to access the result.

result = Geocoder.search("New York, NY").map(&:geometry)
north_east_lat = result[0]["viewport"]["northeast"]["lat"]
north_east_lng = result[0]["viewport"]["northeast"]["lng"]

While this does work it looks ugly and brittle

Any advise on making this better?

Answer 1

As far as I see, geometry data is just a simple Hash. If you don’t like the way you have to access values by [“key”] at multiple levels, you can convert Hash to OpenStruct.

require 'ostruct'

result = Geocoder.search("New York, NY").first
# singleton class http://www.devalot.com/articles/2008/09/ruby-singleton
class << result
  def ostructic_geometry
    ostructly_deep self.geometry
  end

  private
    def ostructly_deep(hash)
      root = OpenStruct.new

      # http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.9.3/libdoc/ostruct/rdoc/OpenStruct.html#method-i-marshal_load
      # -- from the user comment at the bottom --
      # In the marchal_load() example, the Hash should have symbols as keys:
      # hash = { :time => Time.now, :title => 'Birthday Party' }
      load_data = hash.each_pair.inject({}) do |all, (key, value)|
        value = ostructly_deep(value) if value.is_a?(Hash)
        all[key.to_sym] = value # keys need to be symbols to load
        all
      end

      root.marshal_load load_data
      root
    end
end

now_you_can_call_value_from_member_geometry = result.ostructic_geometry
now_you_can_call_value_from_member_geometry.bounds.northeast.lat # => 40.9152414