From: Tom Sawyer <transami@...>
Date: 2002-12-24T09:31:19+09:00
Subject: go ahead, marshal ruby objects via html

doing a lot of eruby/cgi scripting and discovered a neat way to pass entire 
ruby objects between cgi forms. have a look. Note: this is pulled from the 
library i've created called CGIze for doing a number of cgi related things. 
@@cgi holds an instance of CGI.new.

  def CGIze.marshal_to_html(iobj, name='')
    data = CGI.escape(Marshal.dump(iobj))
    print('<input type="hidden" name="_marshal" value="' + data + '"/>')
  end

  def CGIze.marshal_from_html
    return Marshal.load(CGI.unescape(@@cgi['_marshal'][0]))
  end

this saves me a bunch of headache over using lots of hidden variables to pass 
all of an object's data and it seemlessly deals with all types of instance 
variables whether they be arrays, hashes, or whatever.

just thought somebody might be interested.

-transami