Ruby method that returns itself

Question

I am doing some reflection, and ran into an unexpected road block.

Is there an object method in ruby (or rails) that returns itself

ruby-1.9.2> o = Object.new  => #<Object:0x00000104750710>  ruby-1.9.2> o.class  => Object  ruby-1.9.2> o.send :self NoMethodError: undefined method `self' for #<Object:0x00000104750710> 

What I want

ruby-1.9.2> o.send :self  => #<Object:0x00000104750710>  

Is this built in? Or do I need to extend Object (It always gets me nervous opening up Object):

class Object    def itself     self   end  end 

And then so:

ruby-1.9.2> o.send :itself  => #<Object:0x00000104750710>  

---

Ok, some background on what I am trying to achieve. I have a generic table helper in my rails app, and you call if like so:

  render_list @person, [{field: :name, link_to: :itself},                         {field: {address: :name}, link_to: :address}] 

I was struggling on the right way to call :itself -- but i'm thinking that my patch is the way to go.

Answer 1

Yes! If you have Ruby 2.2.0 or later, you can use the Kernel#itself method.

You can see the extensive discussion of this feature here: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/6373. The patch was submitted by Rafael França in message #53.

You can see it in the official Ruby source by looking in object.c.

Answer 2

There is a discussion about adding such method: http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/6373