Access local variables from a different binding in Ruby

Question

In Ruby, you can easily access local variables programmatically by using local_variables and eval. I would really like to have meta-programming acc

Answer 1

It's a shame there isn't a built-in way to get the caller's binding. The block trick seems to be the usual answer to this question.

However there is another 'trick' which existed for older 1.8 Ruby versions called binding_of_caller. Looks like quix ported it to 1.9. You might want to check that out:

https://github.com/quix/binding_of_caller

Answer 2

Here is an example (but it requires extra braces {} which I would rather avoid if possible):

module Foo
  def self.explore_locals &block
    p block.binding.eval 'local_variables'
  end
end

local_1 = 3
Foo.explore_locals{}  # shows [:local_1, :_]