[LRUG] Best way to serialise a Ruby object?

[Olly Legg]

> What's the best way these days to serialise a Ruby object for storage in a SQL database field, and de-serialise it back again?


Rails uses YAML, so its probably not a bad bet.

> Marshal.dump would be the obvious choice.  Just make sure you're
> either storing it as binary or converting to base64 first, to avoid
> interesting encoding/decoding problems in mysql.

Rails used to use Marsahl.dump by default but, as far as I understand it, it's not guaranteed to be readable by future ruby versions. So when people upgraded Ruby they could no longer de-serialize the data they had already stored.

This prompted switching the default to YAML. However this looks like it wasn't as foolproof as they intended.