clone() public

Produces a shallow copy of obj—the instance variables of obj are copied, but not the objects they reference. clone copies the frozen and tainted state of obj. See also the discussion under Object#dup.

class Klass
   attr_accessor :str
end
s1 = Klass.new      #=> #<Klass:0x401b3a38>
s1.str = "Hello"    #=> "Hello"
s2 = s1.clone       #=> #<Klass:0x401b3998 @str="Hello">
s2.str[1,4] = "i"   #=> "i"
s1.inspect          #=> "#<Klass:0x401b3a38 @str=\"Hi\">"
s2.inspect          #=> "#<Klass:0x401b3998 @str=\"Hi\">"

This method may have class-specific behavior. If so, that behavior will be documented under the #initialize_copy method of the class.

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November 16, 2011
1 thank

Change in clone for ActiveRecord objects in ruby-1.9.3

I noticed that cloning an active record object in ruby-1.9.3 and then changing an attribute on the original object will actually change the cloned object as well. This was not the case in ruby-1.9.2.