Question

I’m preparing a string that will be eval‘ed. The string will contain a clause built from an existing Array. I have the following:

def stringify(arg)     return '[ '' + arg.join('', '') + '' ]' if arg.class == Array     ''#{arg}'' end  a = [ 'a', 'b', 'c' ] eval_str = 'p ' + stringify(a) eval(eval_str) 

which prints the string ['a', 'b', 'c'].

Is there a more idiomatic way to do this? Array#to_s doesn’t cut it. Is there a way to assign the output from the p method to a variable?

Thanks!

Answer 1

inspect should accomplish what you are wanting.

>> a = %w(a b c) => ['a', 'b', 'c'] >> a.inspect => '[\'a\', \'b\', \'c\']'