From: Justin Collins <collinsj@...>
Date: 2006-10-30T16:29:32+09:00
Subject: Re: PP / PrettyPrint annoyances

Elliot Winkler wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> PP/PrettyPrint comes in handy when I'm trying to inspect the contents of
> large arrays, but what if some elements are short length-wise?
>
> irb(main):001:0> require 'pp'
> => true
> irb(main):002:0> pp (0..20).to_a
> [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 
> 20]
> => nil
> irb(main):003:0> pp (0..40).to_a
> [0, 
<snip long array
>
>
> This behavior is sort of ridiculous in my opinion. I'd rather have 
> something
> more like:
>
> [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 
> 20,
> 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38,
> 39, 40]
>
> I've looked at the source code and documentation for PrettyPrint and 
> PP but
> I don't understand how they work, so I'm not really sure how the classes
> could be extended so they work how I want them to work. I also tried
> numerous Google searches and it seems no one has a problem with the 
> default
> behavior as I do. Can someone give me a hand here or at least point me in
> the right direction?

You could just use inspect (not sure if that's what you really want, 
though):

irb(main):001:0> (0..100).to_a.inspect
=> "[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 
19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 
37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 
55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 
73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 
91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100]"


-Justin