Trying to find Rails' parameter parsing code

That's not all there is to it. There is also a convention using parentheses to combine parameters together.

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Adam Lassek wrote:

That's not all there is to it. There is also a convention using parentheses to combine parameters together.

Never heard of this. Example?

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:

[Please quote when replying.]

Adam Lassek wrote:

That's not all there is to it. There is also a convention using parentheses to combine parameters together.

Never heard of this. Example?

Oh, wait, are you talking about the (1i) used in date selectors? So far as I know, that's specific to the date parsing code, not a basic field combining feature.

Okay, that's what I needed to know. So this convention is limited to encoding nesting relationships for Hashes, denoting Array values, and it apparently originated from PHP. Still looking for the proper term for this convention, but that's good enough for now.

The concept of parsing parameters into a 'deep hash' based on field names in square brackets was already present in the initial commit of Rails:

http://github.com/rails/rails/blob/db045dbbf60b53dbe013ef25554fd013baf88134/actionpack/lib/action_controller/cgi_ext/cgi_methods.rb#L32

As mentioned earlier, Rack adopted this convention from Rails before its 1.0 release:

http://groups.google.com/group/rack-devel/browse_thread/thread/732e2c1e014bde30/4ee0135df7767f17

In this context of Rack, the common term for this seems to be 'nested parameter parsing'.

The suggestion that the idea comes from PHP is probably correct, given that DHH was working in PHP before starting Rails. PHP parses parameters with names like person[address][city] into PHP's equivalent of nested hashes, multidimensional associative arrays, and in that community the concept seems to go by some variation of 'GET/POST multi-dimensional parameters'.

As a bit of history, this deep hashing was added for PHP 4.0 beta 3 back in 1999:

http://svn.php.net/viewvc?view=revision&revision=12991

in response to this bug:

http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=279

But the basic idea of using 'foo[bar]' and 'foo' as parameter names in order to get a single-level associative or indexed array seems to have been around from at least as far back as PHP 2 in 1996:

http://svn.php.net/viewvc/archived/phpfi/trunk/src/type.c?view=markup&pathrev=2#l47

where it's included with little fanfare and no specific name. No idea if this was in turn lifted from somewhere else -- if anywhere, it'd most likely be from Perl CGI conventions from around that period.

Chris

Chris Mear wrote: