Awesome Dump is Ruby library that dumps Ruby objects as nested hashes/arrays, exposing their internal structure in a form safe for conversion to JSON, YAML, or other data formats.

Notes:

• Makes sure recursive object graphs are ellipse'd and all relevant data is outputted cleanly (i.e. advantages over just using a plain to_json).
• Awesome Dump'ed data looks awesome when converted to_json, then viewed with a JSON viewer (e.g. JSONView (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10869/), FirePHP/FireConsole (http://www.firephp.org/), or json2html (http://json.bloople.net/)).
• This library is very much not-done. It's inconsistent at times and subject to lots of improvement.

# Installing as Rails plugin
$ ruby script/plugin install git://github.com/slippyd/awesome_dump.git

# Installing as a Ruby library
$ git clone git://github.com/slippyd/awesome_dump.git lib/awesome_dump

# Installing as a Ruby library, with Git submodules
$ git submodule add git://github.com/slippyd/awesome_dump.git lib/awesome_dump
$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update

# Cloning the repository
$ git clone git://github.com/slippyd/awesome_dump.git

require 'ad'
some_object.ad

require 'ad', 'json'
some_object.ad(:escape => :safe).to_json

require 'ad', 'yaml'
some_object.ad(:escape => :quote).to_yaml

Supported options:

• ":escape => :safe": Quotes constructs that probably won't translate well into languages other than Ruby (e.g. symbols, classes). Can result in ambigious or lossy results if naming conflicts occur.
• ":escape => :quote": Quotes every piece of data that's dumped (i.e. numbers become strings and Strings become strings that start and end with a quote). Theoretically, this conversion should be reversible back into the original data.

Ruby:

require 'rubygems'
require 'json'
require 'awesome_dump/init'

class Cow
  def initialize
    @moo = true
  end
end

data = [false, 42, %w(forty two), {:how => 'now', 'brown' => Cow.new}]
puts "inspect:\n\t" + data.inspect
puts "ad.inspect:\n\t" + data.ad.inspect
puts "to_json:\n\t" + data.to_json
puts "ad(:escape => :safe).to_json:\n\t" + data.ad(:escape => :safe).to_json

Output:

inspect:
	[false, 42, ["forty", "two"], {:how=>"now", "brown"=>#<Cow:0x101069210 @moo=true>}]
ad.inspect:
	[false, 42, ["forty", "two"], {:how=>"now", "brown"=>{:@moo=>true, :class=>Cow, :object_id=>2156087560}}]
to_json:
	[false,42,["forty","two"],{"how":"now","brown":"#<Cow:0x101069210>"}]
ad(:escape => :safe).to_json:
	[false,42,["forty","two"],{":how":"now","brown":{"class":"Cow","@moo":true,"object_id":2156087560}}]

You can set your own default options by creating .adrc file in your home directory. Within that file assign your defaults to AwesomeDump.defaults. For example:

# ~/.adrc file.
AwesomeDump.defaults = {
  :escape => :quote
}

• Fork the project on Github.
• Make your feature addition or bug fix.
• Add specs for it, making sure $ rake spec is all green.
• Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history.
• Send me a pull request.

awesome_print:

• Michael Dvorkin -- http://github.com/michaeldv
• Daniel Bretoi -- http://github.com/danielb2
• eregon -- http://github.com/eregon
• Tobias Crawley -- http://github.com/tobias

Copyright (c) 2010 Slippy Douglas 'awesome_dump' + 64.chr + 'slippyd.com'

Based on awesome_print, Copyright (c) 2010 Michael Dvorkin %w(mike dvorkin.net) * "@" || %w(mike fatfreecrm.com) * "@"

Released under the MIT license. See LICENSE file for details.