Freelancing Gods 2013

Today was the first time I’d come across Ruby’s undef_method – it’s used in a few places in Rails, particularly with ActiveRecord’s associations. While I see the point of it, there were a few methods I wanted back – and I’ve figured out how to do it – you need to grab the method definition from the superclass. Here’s an example:

class AntiString
  undef_method to_s
end

AntiString.new.to_s
  #=> NameError: undefined method `to_s' for class `AntiString'

AntiString.send(:define_method, :to_s,
  AntiString.superclass.instance_method(:to_s))

AntiString.new.to_s #=> "#<AntiString:0x364ef8>"

Now, the obvious caveat – if the method was originally defined in that class, not the superclass, then I think you’re out of luck. Although I’m guessing you’ll rarely be in a position where you need to resurrect a method like this anyway.