From: Sam Roberts <sroberts@...>
Date: 2005-02-25T12:51:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Requesting addition to IRB (configurable standard output)

Quoting se@digitale-wertschoepfung.de, on Fri, Feb 25, 2005 at 01:22:34AM +0900:
> 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.


How about irb uses #to_irb if it exists, then #inspect if it doesn't.

So, if you like to see pp output instead of inspect, put this in your
~/.irbrc:

  module Kernel
    def to_pp
      s = PP.pp(self, '')
      s.chomp!
      s
    end
    alias_method :to_irb :to_pp
  end

If you like yaml (go figure):

  module Kernel
    alias_method :to_irb :to_yaml
  end

If you like yaml, but only for hashes:

  class Hash
    alias_method :to_irb :to_yaml
  end

everything else will continue to use #inspect.

I don't think this kind of hacking requires a cmd line option, but a
hook to allow folks to do it in their irbrc might be nice.

Cheers,
Sam

> 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
> 
>