From: Stefano Crocco <stefano.crocco@...>
Date: 2007-06-30T01:57:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Issue related to class initialization and irb

Alle venerd� 29 giugno 2007, darren kirby ha scritto:
> Hello all,
>
> My class is a library that allows users to read information/tags etc from
> Flac files.
>
> When the class is initialized in irb the content of every single instance
> variable is dumped to the console. This library parses a lot of data from
> various blocks, and has many data structures to hold it all. As such, this
> output can contain as much as two screens worth. Some of this data is
> non-readable and is for 'top-secret internal use only'. That is, it isn't
> secret, but it has no value or use to the user directly ;).
>
> Anyway, I would really like to clean up this output and have irb print only
> eg:
>
> =>  #<FlacInfo:0x6f97cca4>
>
> Or perhaps the above with a brief enumeration of the blocks found and their
> sizes and/or offsets. To this end I tried defining the class' to_s method,
> and modifying the initialize method's return value. Neither had an effect.
> How might I accomplish this?
>
> Thanks for consideration,
> -d

I think you should redefine the inspect method:

irb: 006> class C
irb: 007+> def initialize x
irb: 008+> @x = x
irb: 009+> end
irb: 010+> def inspect
irb: 011+> "C: x=#{@x}"
irb: 012+> end
irb: 013+> end
irb: 015> C.new 2
=> C: x2

I hope this helps

Stefano