From: Stian Haklev <shaklev@...>
Date: 2007-05-13T23:58:19+09:00
Subject: Tiny IRB improvement - max-size of return format

I'm not sure if it's appropriate to post here, but I found this very
useful, wanted to share it with people, and didn't know where else.

So I use IRB (and script/console) a lot for testing out regexps or small
code blocks, inspecting running Rails apps, and so on. One thing that
can be very annoying is when you run a command like

IRB> a = File.read("bigfile.txt")

and IRB spits out the entire contents of the file. The same happens when
you do

user = User.find_by_name("Stian")

in script/console, and the whole user object is inspected, often with
his/her files, messages, permissions etc added in

As far as I know, there is only a way of turning this return off, but
not of limiting it. I tried turning it off, but found myself doing

IRB> MD5::md5("Peter")
IRB>

over and over, which was annoying. So I wrote this little patch:

diff -r ../1.8-stian/irb/context.rb ./irb/context.rb
37,38d36
<       @max_output_size = (IRB.conf[:MAX_OUTPUT_SIZE] ?
IRB.conf[:MAX_OUTPUT_SIZE] : 500)
<
119d116
<     attr_accessor :max_output_size
diff -r ../1.8-stian/irb.rb ./irb.rb
297c297
<         text = sprintf @context.return_format,
@context.last_value.inspect
---
>         printf @context.return_format, @context.last_value.inspect
299c299
<         text = sprintf @context.return_format, @context.last_value
---
>         printf @context.return_format, @context.last_value
301d300
<       puts text[0..@context.max_output_size]


--

works on both Ruby 1.8.4 and 1.8.6. Basically it adds a new conf. option
- max_output_size, which defaults to 500, and restricts all results
based on this. Note that you can still see the whole thing by p object,
etc.

I just wanted to share it, because I found it very useful. And it's neat
to be able to hack on "Ruby" itself, even in a tiny way :)

thanks
Stian

-- 
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