From: Joe Van Dyk <joevandyk@...>
Date: 2005-07-02T06:48:37+09:00
Subject: no clue

I thought for all of five seconds for a good subject line for this
question, but failed.  Sorry!

I have a string like:

"some_key: blah, some_other_key: more_blah, yet_other_key: yet_more_blah"

I want to build up a hash like

{ :some_key => "blah", :some_other_key => "more_blah", :yet_other_key
=> "yet_more_blah" }

And I don't really want to have to know what the possible keys are in advance.

So, the message format looks like:
<key>: <value>, <key>: <value>

How can I properly extract it out?

Here's my initial attempt, which works, but seems hackish:

      attributes = message.split(",")
      attributes.each do |attribute|
        key, value = attribute.scan(/(\w+): (.+)/)[0]
        result_hash[key.to_sym] = value.strip 
      end
    
Also, this will get ran potentially thousands of times per second, so
executation speed is of some concern.