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Feature #15049

closed

[Request] Easily access all keyword arguments within a method

Added by bherms (Bradley Herman) over 5 years ago. Updated over 5 years ago.

Status:
Feedback
Assignee:
-
Target version:
-
[ruby-core:88760]

Description

As a developer, I'd like to leverage the power of keyword arguments (requirements, defaults, etc) and then be able to access a hash of all the arguments supplied.

def foo(bar:, baz: 1, qux: 2...)
  post('/', body: kargs)
end

This is currently possible by leveraging the RubyVM debug inspector and some meta programming to retrieve the binding and name of the calling method. There is a gem https://github.com/banister/binding_of_caller that abstracts away the logic of crawling through the frame bindings in the debug inspector to find the binding of the caller, but I feel like this functionality would be useful in Ruby.

With the binding_of_caller gem, you can hack together a kargs method like so:

def kargs
  method(caller_locations(1,1)[0].label).parameters.map do |(_type, name)|
    [name, binding.of_caller(2).local_variable_get(name)]
  end.to_h
end

This gets the name of the calling method, pulls the local variables from the method, retrieves the binding, and then retrieves the variables from the binding. By exposing a simpler API to retrieve the caller binding, a kargs method could be added to Ruby fairly easily I would think.

Updated by shevegen (Robert A. Heiler) over 5 years ago

I have had a somewhat related idea in that I wanted a way to access all
parameters in a simple, short manner. A bit similar to $1 $2 etc... for
regexes, just that we could do so programmatically for the arguments
passed into a method or a block. I was unable to come up with a short,
succinct and elegant way for this though so I gave up on the idea - but
I think introspection is great, so +1 for your idea (the idea itself;
not sure if kargs is a good name... won't people confuse that with
kwargs?).

Updated by bherms (Bradley Herman) over 5 years ago

shevegen (Robert A. Heiler) wrote:

I have had a somewhat related idea in that I wanted a way to access all
parameters in a simple, short manner. A bit similar to $1 $2 etc... for
regexes, just that we could do so programmatically for the arguments
passed into a method or a block. I was unable to come up with a short,
succinct and elegant way for this though so I gave up on the idea - but
I think introspection is great, so +1 for your idea (the idea itself;
not sure if kargs is a good name... won't people confuse that with
kwargs?).

Tbh I hadn't thought too much about naming... Was just trying to get something mocked up quickly. Either way, glad to see someone else has desired something similar.

Updated by duerst (Martin Dürst) over 5 years ago

  • Status changed from Open to Feedback

Maybe I'm totally confused, but what's wrong with using **keyword_arguments?

Updated by zverok (Victor Shepelev) over 5 years ago

@duerst (Martin Dürst)

Maybe I'm totally confused, but what's wrong with using **keyword_arguments?

I am not the ticket's authors, but I understand the demand and met with the same requirement in some real-life projects. The most expressive example would be something like this:

def get(path:, accept: :json, headers: {}, **options)
  _request(method: :get, __all the rest of what have passed to this method___)
end

def post(path:, body:, accept: :json, headers: {}, **options)
  _request(method: :post, __all the rest of what have passed to this method___)
end
# ...and so on

Two of currently available options:

  1. Accept just **arguments, and make checking what was mandatory, what should have default value and so on manually (also making auto-generated docs less expressive)
  2. Accept everything as in my example, and then just do
_request(method: :get, path: path, body: body, accept: accept, headers: headers, **options)

...that looks not DRY at all.

So...

Updated by bherms (Bradley Herman) over 5 years ago

duerst (Martin Dürst) wrote:

Maybe I'm totally confused, but what's wrong with using **keyword_arguments?

I agree with zverok's answer.

The main reason for not just doing **args is that you lose several of the benefits of using keyword arguments in the first place: 1) lowering connascence , 2) enforcing requirements (required kargs), 3) settings defaults.

def post(required:, other_required:, defaulted: 'default')
end

def post(**kargs)
  raise ArgumentError, 'missing keyword "required"' unless kargs.has_key?(:required)
  raise ArgumentError, 'missing keyword "other_required"' unless kargs.has_key?(:other_required)
  kargs.reverse_merge!(defaulted: 'default')
end

Those two method definitions are very different IMO and the first is far superior. Obviously we could DRY up the required argument checks, but it still wouldn't be ideal.

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