From: Bruce Williams <bruce@...>
Date: 2003-04-03T11:52:31+09:00
Subject: Re: eval'ing a config file

On Wednesday 02 April 2003 12:34 pm, Mauricio Fern�ndez wrote:
| On Wed, Apr 02, 2003 at 02:15:15AM +0900, Ian Macdonald wrote:
| > Hi,
| >
| > I have a number of LDAP-related programs that I want to share a common
| > config file in which certain variables are stored, such as server, port,
| > password, etc. in the following form.
| >
| > LDAP_HOST = foo.bar.com
| > LDAP_PORT = 389
| > LDAP_PASS = foobar
| >
| > I want the parser to ignore blank lines and those that start with a '#'.
| >
| > The code that I've come up with is this:
| >
| > File.open("/etc/ldaprc") do |f|
| >   f.each do |line|
| >     next if line =~ /^(#|$)/
| >     var, val = /^(.+?)\s*=\s*(.+)$/.match(line)[1,2]
| >     eval "#{var} = '#{val}'"
| >   end
| > end
| >
| > It works, but looking at it, it looks too much like code I might have
| > written for Perl some years ago. Is there a more Rubyesque way to do
| > this? In particular, is there a cleaner way than eval?
|
| Just for the eval part (IMHO the whole problem would be handled better
|
| by some module in the RAA ;-):

Personally, I'd sacrifice the equals sign, make it a colon, and call it a yaml 
file.  YAML would then take care of the primitives.  You could even iterate 
through and create constants if you don't feel like using a configuration 
hash, or create a type to handle it upon loading.  You'd even have things 
like aliases/anchors, without having to homebrew them.

A matter of taste, I suppose.

// Bruce