From: Alex McHale <alexmchale@...>
Date: 2004-06-25T04:40:35+09:00
Subject: Re: N Dimensional Hash?

What about something like this?

require 'pp'

class Hash
    alias origindex []

    def [](*depth)
        return origindex( depth.first ) if depth.length == 1
        top = self
        depth.each {|level| 
            top = top.origindex(level)
            break unless top.respond_to? '[]'
        }
        top
    end
end

h = { :mini => { :cooper => :red }, 
      :ford => { :focus => :white, :mustang => :blue }
}

pp h[]
pp h[:mini]
pp h[:mini, :cooper]
pp h[:something, :else, :another]


The error handling needs to be cleaned up so that this different []
behaves more identically to the original [], but maybe this is
something along the lines of what you're looking for?

Note that in this case, h[:something, :else] is different than
h[:else, :something].  It's something to start with, at least.

Alex