Accessing data from httparty response

Question

Using httparty I can get the following response:

puts Representative.find_by_zip(46544).inspect

-->

{"results"=>[{"name"=>"Joe Donnelly", "district"=>"2", "office"=>"1218 Longworth", "phone"=>"(202) 225-3915", "link"=>"http://donnelly.house.gov/", "state"=>"IN"}]

source of the example: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2008/07/29/it-s-an-httparty-and-everyone-is-invited/

but I fail to access the data, for example:

Representative.find_by_zip(46544).inspect["name"] returns nil

How can I access individual elements of this response?

Answer 1

Object#inspect returns a string, not a hash. You want this:

Representative.find_by_zip(46544)['results'][0]['name']

This is what's going on: Representative#find_by_zip returns a Hash with just one index: 'results'. The item at 'results' is an array, which in this case only contains one element, so we use [0] to get the first (and only) element. That element is itself a hash that has the 'name' key, which points to the name of the first (and only) representative returned.

When you have complex hashes and arrays it's sometimes useful to format it in a more readable way to figure out how to get at the data you want:

{ "results" => [
    { "name"      => "Joe Donnelly",
      "district"  => "2",
      "office     => "1218 Longworth",
      "phone"     => "(202) 225-3915",
      "link"      => "http://donnelly.house.gov/",
      "state"     => "IN"
    }
  ]
}

That should make it more clear what's inside what here.