returning struct data as a hash in ruby

Question

Is there a valid reason for there not being a method to return the data of a standard ruby struct as a hash (member, value pairs)? Seeing that structs and hashes have very similar use cases, I'm surprised that no such method exists. Or does it, and I'm just too blind?

It's easy to implement (and i have done so for now), but lack of such functionality in the standard libs, has me thinking that I might have not really grasped the concept of structs in ruby.

Answer 1

(Ruby <= 1.9.3) OpenStruct has OpenStruct#marshall_dump and Struct has Struct#each_pair (use to_a to get the pairs and Hash+to_a to get the hash):

Person = Struct.new(:name, :age) person = Person.new("Jamie", 23) person_hash = Hash[person.each_pair.to_a] #=> {:age=>23, :name=>"Jamie"} 

With Ruby 2.0 things are easier: Struct#to_h, OpenStruct#to_h:

Person = Struct.new(:name, :age) person = Person.new("Jamie", 23) person_hash = person.to_h #=> {:age=>23, :name=>"Jamie"}