From: Dan Debertin <airboss@...>
Date: 2002-07-03T10:04:50+09:00
Subject: Re: Getting CGI arguments as scalars

Tom Sawyer writes:

 > the only trick is to remember to access the paramaters
 > (i.e.cgi.params) directly if you want to manipulate the parameters
 > array, as [] will no longer be certain to return such a reference.

Chances are you're going to know in advance if your form (or whatever)
contains duplicate values. In these cases, why not be consistent and
convert? [] returning a different kind of object under certain
circumstances seems undesirable to me -- eventually I'm going to
forget to invoke .kind_of? on the result.

Here's what I ended up doing to solve the same problem:

module CGIFeatures
  # Extensions to CGI to make it act more like a hash.
  def to_h
    h = {}
    # Obviously, this breaks duplicate CGI params. 
    self.keys.each { |k| h[k] = self[k][0] }
    h
  end
end

cgi = CGI.new
cgi.extend(CGIFeatures)
params_as_hash = cgi.to_h


Dan
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The art of folding problem users into representational shapes.