benburkert.com

Jay Phillips wrote a wicked little gem called Superators this summer, and I’ve been looking for an excuse to use it. Here’s a superator to change the protection of a method:

require 'rubygems'
require 'superators'

class Class
  superator "<-" do |method_id|
    private method_id
  end

  superator "<+" do |method_id|
    public method_id
  end

  superator "<~" do |method_id|
    protected method_id
  end
end

This allows you to quickly access private methods:

puts [].rand rescue "rand is private!"
Array <+ "rand"
puts [].rand

Dangerous, but useful if you need to keep a method private but you want to test it as if it was public (think: testing your rails models).

describe Foo, "#bar" do

  before(:each) do
    # Foo#bar is private
    Foo <+ "bar"
  end

  after(:each) do
    Foo <- "bar"
  end

  it "should do something amazing!" do
    bar.should be_amazing
  end
end

Enjoy.