From: Marcin Raczkowski <mailing.mr@...>
Date: 2007-11-03T05:25:12+09:00
Subject: ActAsHash

I have no idea if someone hacked something like this already, i tried 
searching with google but it's hard to type good keys ... anyway here's 
what i wrote for SOAP4R that had LOTS of instance variables that i 
already had in hash and wanted eay way to assign them.

this should work for almost every class and should provide nice and easy 
way to assigning values to instance variables in hash-like way.

of course it exposes all instance variables so encuspulaction (or 
whatever you spell it) goes flying out of window.

module ActAsHash
   def [](index)
     self.instance_variable_get(("@"+index.to_s).to_sym)
   end

   def []=(index,value)
     self.instance_variable_set(("@"+index.to_s).to_sym, value)
   end

   def from_hash(hash)
     hash.each_pair do |k,v|
       self[k]=v
     end
   end
end

and use it simply like

class A
   include ActAsHash

   attr_accessor :foo
end

a = A.new
a["foo"] = :bar
a.foo => :bar
a[:foo] => :bar

i hope it's usefull for someone :) mayby it can find place in Facets ;)