Ruby Quicktips

Deep clone

Ruby comes with an Object#clone method that lets you copy objects. But this method makes a shallow copy, i.e. a duplicate without copying any referenced objects.

Object#clone:

Produces a shallow copy of obj - the instance variables of obj are copied, but not the objects they reference.

If you need a deep clone of an object - i.e. a copy including referenced objects - the Marshal module is your friend:

deep_cloned = Marshal::load(Marshal.dump(origin))

This tip was submitted by Jaime Iniesta.