From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2006-01-26T04:36:09+09:00
Subject: Re: String#de_inspect (and Kernel#suspicious)

Erik Veenstra wrote:
> If you do an inspect on a collection of Ruby objects, like a
> hash, you end up with a string. It's possible to store this
> string in a file, read it again somewhere in the future,
> evaluate it and end up with the same collection of Ruby objects
> in core.
> 
> So I've written this String#de_inspect, which uses
> Kernel#suspicious (slow!) to avoid any malicious code from
> being evaluated.
> 
> A kind of human-readable marshaling. That is-human-readable is
> important, for me, in this situation.
> 
> (You can only dump objects which inspect to Ruby code, e.g.
> Strings, Numerics, Symbols, Arrays, Hashes, nil, true and
> false.)

For the object->string direction, it may be useful to use amarshal,
rather than inspect:

http://cvs.m17n.org/~akr/amarshal/

One advantage is with cyclic references. Using #inspect will not
preserve enough information to reconstruct the reference.

-- 
      vjoel : Joel VanderWerf : path berkeley edu : 510 665 3407