From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2004-10-06T06:56:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Use ri from irb ?

On Wed, Oct 06, 2004 at 05:41:53AM +0900, Mark Hubbart wrote:
> > Add the following to your .irbrc file:
> > 
> >    def ri(*names)
> >      system(%{ri #{names.map {|name| name.to_s}.join(" ")}})
> >    end
> 
> Is it just me, or does that look a bit kludgy? ri itself is a ruby
> script, and a ruby lib. It seems to me that there should be a clean
> way of including the ri documentation in every object's methods... ie:
> 
> irb> require 'irb/ri'
>   ==> true
> irb> Kernel.docs
> [... paged documentation output ...]
>   ==> Kernel
> irb> Kernel.docs(:puts)
> [...]
> 
> ... and so on. This should be able to be one programatically, rather
> than spawning an ri process.

Well, look at the source of /usr/local/bin/ri and you get only three lines:

  require 'rdoc/ri/ri_driver'
  ri = RiDriver.new
  ri.process_args

It's a shame that that process_args doesn't take an (optional) array
parameter; it forces you to use ARGV. But you can frig it:

$ cat .irbrc
require 'rdoc/ri/ri_driver'
def ri(*names)
  oargv = Object.const_get(:ARGV)
  Object.const_set(:ARGV, names)
  RiDriver.new.process_args
  Object.const_set(:ARGV, oargv)
end

$ irb
irb(main):001:0> ri 'Enumerable'

Regards,

Brian.