Ruby objects and JSON serialization (without Rails)

For the JSON library to be available, you may have to install libjson-ruby from your package manager.

To use the ‘json’ library:

require 'json'

To convert an object to JSON (these 3 ways are equivalent):

JSON.dump object #returns a JSON string
JSON.generate object #returns a JSON string
object.to_json #returns a JSON string

To convert JSON text to an object (these 2 ways are equivalent):

JSON.load string #returns an object
JSON.parse string #returns an object

It will be a bit more difficult for objects from your own classes. For the following class, to_json will produce something like "\"#<A:0xb76e5728>\"".

class A
    def initialize a=[1,2,3], b='hello'
        @a = a
        @b = b
    end
end

This probably isn’t desirable. To effectively serialise your object as JSON, you should create your own to_json method. To go with this, a from_json class method would be useful. You could extend your class like so:

class A
    def to_json
        {'a' => @a, 'b' => @b}.to_json
    end
    def self.from_json string
        data = JSON.load string
        self.new data['a'], data['b']
    end
end

You could automate this by inheriting from a ‘JSONable’ class:

class JSONable
    def to_json
        hash = {}
        self.instance_variables.each do |var|
            hash[var] = self.instance_variable_get var
        end
        hash.to_json
    end
    def from_json! string
        JSON.load(string).each do |var, val|
            self.instance_variable_set var, val
        end
    end
end

Then you can use object.to_json to serialise to JSON and object.from_json! string to copy the saved state that was saved as the JSON string to the object.