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Dio - Dive Into Objects!

Dio, or "Dive Into Objects", is a wrapper for Ruby objects that do not have a Pattern Matching interface defined, but have methods which make them able to implement an approximation of it:

Dio[1] in { succ: { succ: { succ: 4 } } }
# => true

Using this interface we can even pattern match against arbitrary objects by treating the pattern match keys as method calls to "dive into" an object to match against it.

Usage

There are three core types of Forwarders, the center of how Dio works:

  1. Dynamic - Uses public_send for Hash matches, and Array method coercion for Array matches
  2. Attribute - Uses attr_* methods as source of match data
  3. String Hash - Treats String Hashes like Symbol ones for the purpose of matching.

Let's take a look at each of them.

Dynamic Forwarder

Used with Dio.dynamic or Dio[], the default forwarder. This uses public_send to extract attributes for pattern matching.

With Hash Matching

With an Integer this might look like this:

Dio[1] in { succ: { succ: { succ: 4 } } }
# => true

This has the same result as calling 1.succ.succ.succ with each nested Hash in the pattern match working on the next value. That means it can also be used to do this:

Dio[1] in {
  succ: { chr: "\x02", to_s: '2' },
  to_s: '1'
}

With Array Matching

If the object under the wrapper provides a method that can be used to coerce the value into an Array it can be used for an Array match.

Those methods are: to_a, to_ary, and map.

Given a Node class with a value and a set of children:

Node = Struct.new(:value, :children)

We can match against it as if it were capable of natively pattern matching:

tree = Node[1,
  Node[2, Node[3, Node[4]]],
  Node[5],
  Node[6, Node[7], Node[8]]
]

case Dio.dynamic(tree)
in [1, [*, [5, _], *]]
  true
else
  false
end

Attribute Forwarder

Attribute Forwarders are more conservative than Dynamic ones as they only work on public attributes, or those that are defined with attr_*. In the case of this class:

class Person
  attr_reader :name, :age, :children

  def initialize(name:, age:, children: [])
    @name = name
    @age = age
    @children = children
  end
end

...the attributes available would be name, age, and children. This also means that you can dive into children as well.

With Hash Matching

Let's say we had Alice here:

Person.new(
  name: 'Alice',
  age: 40,
  children: [
    Person.new(name: 'Jim', age: 10),
    Person.new(name: 'Jill', age: 10)
  ]
)

With Hash style matching we can do this:

case Dio.attribute(alice)
in { name: /^A/, age: 30..50 }
  true
else
  false
end

...which, as pattern matches use === lets us use a lot of other fun things. We can even go deeper into searching through the children attribute:

case Dio.attribute(alice)
in { children: [*, { name: /^J/ }, *] }
  true
else
  false
end

With Array Matching

This one is a bit more spurious, as it applies the attributes in the name it sees them. For something like our Node above with two attributes it will work the same as dynamic.

String Hash Forwarder

Pattern Matching cannot apply to String keys, which can be annoying when working with data and not wanting to deep transform it into Symbol keys. The String Hash Forwarder tries to address this.

With Hash Matching

Let's say we had the following Hash:

hash = {
  'a' => 1,
  'b' => 2,
  'c' => {
    'd' => 3,
    'e' => {
      'f' => 4
    }
  }
}

We can match against it by using the Symbol equivalents of our String keys:

case Dio.string_hash(hash)
in { a: 1, b: 2 }
  true
else
  false
end

...and because of the nature of Dio you can continue to dive deeper:

case Dio.string_hash(hash)
in { a: 1, b: 2, c: { d: 1..10, e: { f: 3.. } } }
  true
else
  false
end

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'dio'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install dio

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/baweaver/dio. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Code of Conduct

Everyone interacting in the Dio project’s codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.

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Dio - Dive Into Objects - Ruby Pattern Matching interface for Objects which have none (yet)

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