From: Chris Shea <cmshea@...>
Date: 2007-06-30T02:00:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Issue related to class initialization and irb

On Jun 29, 10:44 am, darren kirby <bulli...@badcomputer.org> wrote:
> 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
> --
> darren kirby :: Part of the problem since 1976 ::http://badcomputer.org
> "...the number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected..."
> - Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, June 1972

What you want to do is redefine the inspect method.

irb(main):001:0> class Test
irb(main):002:1> attr_accessor :foo, :bar
irb(main):003:1> end
=> nil
irb(main):004:0> a = Test.new
=> #<Test:0x100daec>
irb(main):005:0> a.foo = 42
=> 42
irb(main):006:0> a.bar = "a place to buy drinks"
=> "a place to buy drinks"
irb(main):007:0> a
=> #<Test:0x100daec @bar="a place to buy drinks", @foo=42>
irb(main):008:0> class Test
irb(main):009:1> def inspect
irb(main):010:2> "#<Test:#{self.object_id}>"
irb(main):011:2> end
irb(main):012:1> end
=> nil
irb(main):013:0> a
=> #<Test:8416630>

HTH,
Chris