The docs say this:
{ :name => "Konata Izumi", 'age' => 16, 1 => 2 }.to_json
=> {"name": "Konata Izumi", "1": 2, "age": 16}
But when I actually try it in the rails console it looks like this:
{ :name => "Konata Izumi", 'age' => 16, 1 => 2 }.to_json
=> "{\"name\":\"Konata Izumi\",\"age\":16,\"1\":2}"
How do I get it to return an object/hash instead of a string? I don't want the outer quotes around the curly braces. I want {...} instead of "{...}".
irb(main):012:0> x = { :name => "Konata Izumi", 'age' => 16, 1 => 2 }.to_json
irb(main):013:0> puts x
{"name":"Konata Izumi","age":16,"1":2}
=> nil
If you capture the results in a variable and then print it, you'll see that it is working as expected. The quotes are just the console's way of indicating that the stuff after => is a string.
JSON is a format for serializing data to text. It simply is a String, it cannot be anything else, that would be non-sensical.
If you want to keep a Ruby object instead of serializing to a string, simply don't serialize to a string.
{ :name => "Konata Izumi", 'age' => 16, 1 => 2 }this is already a hash, no need to doto_json.