I am so used to work in PHP with multi-dimensional arrays, where I can assign and initialize a hash by
unset($a); // just to show that there is no variable $a
$a['settings']['system']['memory'] = '1 Gb';
$a['settings']['system']['disk space'] = '100 Gb';
Is there a way to do similar thing in Ruby? Or I need to initialize all dimensions first, and then to assign values. Is it possible to define an advanced Hash which will allow to do what I need? How would you do that?
Update
In addition to the solution proposed by Douglas (see below), I have found a thread on the subject, in which Brian Schröäer has proposed an extension for the Hash
class:
class AutoHash < Hash
def initialize(*args)
super()
@update, @update_index = args[0][:update], args[0][:update_key] unless args.empty?
end
def [](k)
if self.has_key?k
super(k)
else
AutoHash.new(:update => self, :update_key => k)
end
end
def []=(k, v)
@update[@update_index] = self if @update and @update_index
super
end
end
It allows to solve the problem when a missing hash item is undesirably created when the item value was only requested, e.g. a['key']
.
Some additional references