From: Alex Fenton <alex@...>
Date: 2006-01-03T10:37:57+09:00
Subject: Re: output buffering

hi

mark wrote:
> Is there any way to do php-style output buffering with ruby or rails?
> as in:
> ob_start()

In ruby, generally, you'd achieve the same thing by redirecting $stdout. Something like:

require 'stringio'
tmp_out = StringIO.new()

# redirect STDOUT
$stdout = tmp_out

puts "this and that" # would normally go to STDOUT

# restore default stdout
$stdout = STDOUT

tmp_out.rewind()
puts tmp_out.read() # print out what was sent to STDOUT

 I don't know whether Ruby on Rails has any special facility for temporarily 
redirecting output of literal HTML snippets within a mixed Ruby-HTML template (as the PHP function does, iirc). The rails mailing list should be able to help you with that one.

cheers
alex