With my side project, I need to be able to serialize some Ruby objects and pass them to a Matlab program that will perform data analysis and produce a few reports.
I started using YAML since it was pretty and easy to read the output. Unfortunately it seems the YAML support for Matlab is pretty poor. I found a few libraries but they didn’t seem well supported.
Next I tried just changing #to_yaml on my array to #to_json. Unfortunately the JSON returned only referenced the object id and the class. Since I don’t yet have a need for Rails, I tried to look for some Ruby-only solutions. The 3rd Party library section of this 2010 article provided a solution, but after seeing the ease of #to_yaml, I wanted something more built-in.
I ended up deciding to just use ActiveSupport based on the conclusion to this article.
Caveat: Don’t forget to use an underscore when doing the require 'active_support/json' even though to install you just have to do gem install activesupport