From: Daniel Berger <djberge@...>
Date: 2003-07-16T00:45:46+09:00
Subject: Determining if a String is marshalled

Hi all,

I was just wondering if there's a way to determine if a string has been 
marshalled without visual inspection.  Something along the lines of 
"string.marshalled?"  or "string.kind_of?(MarshaledString)".  Is there a 
regex I could use?

This had me thinking that it would be nice if Marshal.dump returned a 
MarshaledString rather than just a String.

The scenario I'm hitting is a client/server setup where the server may 
return a marshaled string or a plain string, depending on the plugin it 
calls.  At the moment I'm resorting to this, which has potential problems:

r = client.gets
begin
    rv = Marshal.load(r)
rescue TypeError
    p r
rescue ArgumentError => e
    p "R: #{r}"
else
    puts rv
end

What do you think?

Regards,

Dan