Is there a way to access method arguments in Ruby?

Question

In Ruby 1.9.2 and later you can use the parameters method on a method to get the list of parameters for that method. This will return a list of pairs indicating the name of the parameter and whether it is required.

e.g.

If you do

def foo(x, y)
end

then

method(:foo).parameters # => [[:req, :x], [:req, :y]]

You can use the special variable __method__ to get the name of the current method. So within a method the names of its parameters can be obtained via

args = method(__method__).parameters.map { |arg| arg[1].to_s }

You could then display the name and value of each parameter with

logger.error "Method failed with " + args.map { |arg| "#{arg} = #{eval arg}" }.join(', ')

---

Note: since this answer was originally written, in current versions of Ruby eval can no longer be called with a symbol. To address this, an explicit to_s has been added when building the list of parameter names i.e. parameters.map { |arg| arg[1].to_s }

Since Ruby 2.1 you can use binding.local_variable_get to read value of any local variable, including method parameters (arguments). Thanks to that you can improve the accepted answer to avoid evil eval.

def foo(x, y)
  method(__method__).parameters.map do |_, name|
    binding.local_variable_get(name)
  end
end

foo(1, 2)  # => 1, 2

One way to handle this is:

def foo(*args)
    first_name, last_name, age, sex, is_plumber = *args
    # some code
    # error happens here
    logger.error "Method has failed, here are all method arguments #{args.inspect}"    
end

This is an interesting question. Maybe using local_variables? But there must be a way other than using eval. I'm looking in Kernel doc

class Test
  def method(first, last)
    local_variables.each do |var|
      puts eval var.to_s
    end
  end
end

Test.new().method("aaa", 1) # outputs "aaa", 1