DidactMacros
I put this under chat/ discussions as this does not regard a bug, just some design/best practices.
I have program that I am building as per an exercise, and I want to use Kernel.to_string so that I don’t have to check a type later down the line.
The data being converted to string is simply going onto a table, and is being obtained from a keyword list. If the get on the keyword list yields nil the to_string will yield an empty string, and I’m fine with that.
I did not want to use inspect, as this is for logging/debugging and it seems there could be some security consequences down the line if I get into the habit of using inspect in this way, since it processes special terms and sigils.
to_string seems quite powerful, and it’s going to cut down a lot of code that I didn’t want to write and which would have seemed a bit repetitive, but should I be using it in this way?
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benwilson512
Hey @DidactMacros your distinction between
inspectandto_stringis dead on.inspectis dangerous precisely because it can give away potentially significant information.to_stringhowever is designed to be used exactly the way you’re using it. Types that have a canonical, user facing string representation will just work!DidactMacros
Thanks a lot, that’s great to know. Full steam ahead then.
ityonemo
Iirc, this happens under the hood anytime you use #{} interpolation
rhcarvalho
That’s right, the relevant docs:
Adzz
What does this bit mean?
DidactMacros
I mean that I want to convert the data to a string if it is a compatible data type for the to_string function, rather than identifying and converting it through guards or cases.
The data is being obtained through list[key] from a keyword list, if nil is yielded I will get an empty string, which is what I want.
If any functions or incompatible types are sent through, it would throw an error, I’m not expecting that, but a runtime error seemed appropriate for such an occurrence.
Should I try to handle that differently?