In Ruby, an instance variable is a variable declared inside a class that's specific to each instantiated object of the class it's defined in (i.e. each class instance has a separate copy of an instance variable). It is:
- Declared inside instance methods, or the constructor method;
- Created by adding a single at-sign (
@
) before a variable name (e.g.@variable_name
); nil
before initialization;- Accessible by class instance methods, as well as derived classes (or included modules);
- Not accessible by class methods;
- Always private to outside access.
Consider, for example, the following Person
class that has two instance variables; "@name
" and "@age
":
class Person def initialize(name, age) @name = name @age = age end end
To get/set these instance variables from outside the class, you must create getter/setter methods. For example, you can use the attr_reader
accessor method to auto-generate getters for the instance variables, like so:
class Person def initialize(name, age) @name = name @age = age end attr_reader :name, :age end person1 = Person.new("bob", 34) puts person1.name #=> "bob" puts person1.age #=> 34 person2 = Person.new("john", 22) puts person2.name #=> "john" puts person2.age #=> 22
This post was published (and was last revised ) by Daniyal Hamid. Daniyal currently works as the Head of Engineering in Germany and has 20+ years of experience in software engineering, design and marketing. Please show your love and support by sharing this post.