What's the best way to allow users to input fields that will be serialized as hashes or arrays?

Question

I have a field that is stored like this:

serialize :value

And, I'd like to store it as an array/hash/string depending on the input format. Is there an accepted best practice about how to handle this? The input will always come from the user.

Answer 1

If I understand your problem correctly, you are talking about the opposite of serialization, which is parsing or tokenzing (converting a string into meaningful pieces)... That's a very generic problem, but take a look at the String.match and String.scan to get you started. Here are some stack overflow quetions that could be helpful (remember to search for things like this first!)

What's the "ruby way" to parse a string for a single key/value?

How do I tokenize this string in Ruby?

Answer 2

The best practice is to serialize Arrays and Hashes. When it comes to string there is no need for serialization. HTML form elements like checkboxes posts the array, which you can be serialized and saved directly in table. For Hashes, you should manipulate yourself accordingly and apply to the attribute.