How do I serialize data with Sequel and Ruby?

Question

I have a table which should store an id, a name and a hash. How do I serialize the Hash? (I'm using Ruby and Sequel as ORM.)

Answer 1

If you're using Sequel::Model, the Serialization plugin should do the trick.

Answer 2

Nor Ruby nor SQL are ORM. You can use ActiveRecord from Rails. You will have to define a class with attributes you specified and than simply use save and find methods.

Answer 3

You seem to have found a sufficient answer but I thought I'd chip in with a general-purpose ruby way.

# outside of rails you'll need this
require 'base64'

# encode
h = { :first => "John", :age => 23 }
encoded = Base64.encode64(Marshal.dump(h))

# decode
h = Marshal.load(Base64.decode64(encoded))

I use this to serialize ruby objects (e.g. across JSON and to the DB), and you'll find that cookie sessions in Rails encode the session hash in the same way. It's often handy to debug the session contents from a browser cookie using this.