When you're accessing deep keys within a hash you don't want to have to write stuff like `if foo && foo["bar"] && foo["bar"]["baz"] && foo["bar"]["baz"]["bang"]`. So here's an idea to have a method on the Hash class that uses a sort of XML type query, eg; hash.quiet_fetch('a/b/c')

quiet_fetch.rb

class Hash
  def quiet_fetch query
    current = self
    query.split('/').each do |key|
      if current.fetch(key, false)
        current = current.fetch(key)
      else
        return nil
      end
    end
    return current
  end
end

hash = {
  "a" => {
    "b" => {
      "c" => "hi"
    }
  }
}

puts hash.quiet_fetch "a/b/c"
# => "hi"

Looks like there are multiple solutions (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4371716/looking-for-a-good-way-to-avoid-hash-conditionals-in-ruby/4380514#4380514) but my preferred is using inject

class Hash
def get_deep(*fields)
fields.inject(self) {|acc,e| acc[e] if acc.is_a?(Hash)}
end
end

Clean and simple
hash.get_deep("a","b","c")

Bingo! That's exactly the answer I was looking for. Using the * for args, that's the proper way to do it. And then making a one liner for the actual drilling down into the nested hashes, genius :)