From: Sascha Ebach <se@...>
Date: 2005-02-25T01:22:34+09:00
Subject: Requesting addition to IRB (configurable standard output)

Hello,

I was talking to Florian Gross on IRC about his Breakpoint library 
http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-breakpoint/ which I (and many others) 
use in Rails applications for testing and debbugging purposes.

I often use it to see what is going on with my objects. Sometimes they 
are pretty big (filled with lots of data). The standard output of IRB 
looks like #inspect output.

irb(main):006:0> [1,2,3].inspect
=> "[1, 2, 3]"

This can be really noisy if the objects that are inspected have a lot of 
data in them (like a whole page of HTML).

It would be nice if this were configurable. There already is an option 
--inspect for IRB. So what I am requesting is that one can define their 
own "inspector" like this.

irb --inspect=y
or
irb --inspect=pretty_print_inspect
or
irb --inspect=some_selfmade_inspector

irb --inspect would be equal to irb --inspect=inspect

given irb --inspect=y output would look like this:

$ irb -ryaml --inspect=y
irb(main):002:0> [1,2,3]
---
- 1
- 2
- 3

Do you think this would be worthy addition to IRB? Florian suggested to 
ask on the ruby-core ML cause this is rather a feature that should be in 
IRB than in ruby-breakpoint.

Thank you for considering

Sascha Ebach