Access variables programmatically by name in Ruby

Question

I\'m not entirely sure if this is possible in Ruby, but hopefully there\'s an easy way to do this. I want to declare a variable and later find out the name of the variable.

Answer 1

Building on joshmsmoore, something like this would probably do it:

# Returns the first instance variable whose value == x
# Returns nil if no name maps to the given value
def instance_variable_name_for(x)
  self.instance_variables.find do |var|
    x == self.instance_variable_get(var)
  end
end