Question

In Ruby, is there a way to get the name of the class that creates an instance of MyClass?

I know that I could pass it in as an argument on my initialize method, but I want to know if any data is already there that has to do with the class that created an instance of MyClass in side of MyClass.

So it would be like

class MyClass
  def initialize
    @who_called_me = who_called_me.name
  end

  def who_called_me
    puts @who_called_me
  end
end 

Answer 1

Although this is not portable between implementations and versions, this is a crude solution:

who_made_me=caller[3].split(':')[1][4..-2]

What this does is it gets the current stack, skips the strings for initialize, allocate, and new, and then gets the method name out of the string. Again, this is a total hack, and is based around unspecified behavior. I would not suggest using this unless absolutely necessary.