From: gabriele renzi <surrender_it@...1.vip.ukl.yahoo.com>
Date: 2003-09-17T19:34:36+09:00
Subject: Re: [newbie]saving and reading array of associative array

il Wed, 17 Sep 2003 11:13:26 +0200,
yvon.thoravallist@-SUPPRIMEZ-free.fr.invalid (Yvon Thoraval) ha
scritto::

>i'm looking for examples of saving to file and reading back an array of
>associative array, in a ruby like way.
>
>saying i have something like :
>
>one = {"Name" => "Smith", "Surname" => "John" ...}
>two = {"Name" => "Dupont", "Surname" => "Jean" ...}
>
>myFriends = [one, two, ...]
>
>i want to save into a file "myFriends.db" the array of hashes myFriends
>in such a way reading it back will recorver the array of hashes the
>easiest way...

----------------------------------------------------------
Marshal::dump
     dump( anObject [, anIO] , limit=--1 ) -> anIO
------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Serializes anObject and all descendent objects. If anIO is
     specified, the serialized data will be written to it, otherwise
the
     data will be returned as a String. If limit is specified, the
     traversal of subobjects will be limited to that depth. If limit
is
     negative, no checking of depth will be performed.

More easy than you think ;)

BTW you could even use PStore, included in the standard lib, it works
similar to an hash, but gets saved on disk and supports 'transactions'
for data integrity.