How to unfreeze an object in Ruby?

Solution 1:

Update: As of Ruby 2.7 this no longer works!

Yes and no. There isn't any direct way using the standard API. However, with some understanding of what #freeze? does, you can work around it. Note: everything here is implementation details of MRI's current version and might be subject to change.

Objects in CRuby are stored in a struct RVALUE.
Conveniently, the very first thing in the struct is VALUE flags;.
All Object#freeze does is set a flag, called FL_FREEZE, which is actually equal to RUBY_FL_FREEZE. RUBY_FL_FREEZE will basically be the 11th bit in the flags.
All you have to do to unfreeze the object is unset the 11th bit.

To do that, you could use Fiddle, which is part of the standard library and lets you tinker with the language on C level:

require 'fiddle'

class Object
  def unfreeze
    Fiddle::Pointer.new(object_id * 2)[1] &= ~(1 << 3)
  end
end

Non-immediate value objects in Ruby are stored on address = their object_id * 2. Note that it's important to make the distinction so you would be aware that this wont let you unfreeze Fixnums for example.

Since we want to change the 11th bit, we have to work with the 3th bit of the second byte. Hence we access the second byte with [1].

~(1 << 3) shifts 1 three positions and then inverts the result. This way the only bit which is zero in the mask will be the third one and all other will be ones.

Finally, we just apply the mask with bitwise and (&=).

foo = 'A frozen string'.freeze
foo.frozen? # => true
foo.unfreeze
foo.frozen? # => false
foo[/ (?=frozen)/] = 'n un'
foo # => 'An unfrozen string'

Solution 2:

No, according to the documentation for Object#freeze:

There is no way to unfreeze a frozen object.

The frozen state is stored within the object. Calling freeze sets the frozen state and thereby prevents further modification. This includes modifications to the object's frozen state.

Regarding your example, you could assign a new string instead:

script = 'Do you want to build a snowman?'
script.freeze

script = script.dup if script.frozen?
script[/snowman/] = 'castle of ice'
script #=> "Do you want to build a castle of ice?"

Ruby 2.3 introduced String#+@, so you can write +str instead of str.dup if str.frozen?