Converting nested hash keys from CamelCase to snake_case in Ruby

Question

I\'m trying to build an API wrapper gem, and having issues with converting hash keys to a more Rubyish format from the JSON the API returns.

The JSON contains multip

Answer 1

You need to treat Array and Hash separately. And, if you're in Rails, you can use underscore instead of your homebrew to_snake_case. First a little helper to reduce the noise:

def underscore_key(k)
  k.to_s.underscore.to_sym
  # Or, if you're not in Rails:
  # to_snake_case(k.to_s).to_sym
end

If your Hashes will have keys that aren't Symbols or Strings then you can modify underscore_key appropriately.

If you have an Array, then you just want to recursively apply convert_hash_keys to each element of the Array; if you have a Hash, you want to fix the keys with underscore_key and apply convert_hash_keys to each of the values; if you have something else then you want to pass it through untouched:

def convert_hash_keys(value)
  case value
    when Array
      value.map { |v| convert_hash_keys(v) }
      # or `value.map(&method(:convert_hash_keys))`
    when Hash
      Hash[value.map { |k, v| [underscore_key(k), convert_hash_keys(v)] }]
    else
      value
   end
end