Ruby Loop through some attributes of an object

Question

In Rails, I have a class name User , in which I just want to look at :name, :address, :age

I would like to write a piece of code that's something like:

user = User.new
[name, address, age].zip(["Name", "Address", 10]).each do |attribute, val|
  user.attribute = val
end

The thing is I don't know how to do it properly, since user.attribute is obviously not a valid line. In other word, is there anyway so that user.attribute gets evaluated as user.name , user.address , user.age depends on the loop?

Answer 1

You should use send method

user.send "#{attribute}=", val

If attribute is, say, :name , then the line above is equivalent to

user.name = val

Answer 2

Actually I can do it this way:

[name, address, age].zip(["Name", "Address", 10]).each do |attribute, val|
    user[attribute] = val
end

This way works, too

Answer 3

user.send(:name) would be the same as calling user.name , so you may want to try that.

Answer 4

user = User.new
[name, address, age].zip(["Name", "Address", 10]).each do |attribute, val|
  user.write_attribute(attribute, val)
end

But that's what I'd write:

user = User.new
user.attributes = {name => "Name", address => "Address", age => 10}