From: Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@...>
Date: 2007-08-04T08:01:31+09:00
Subject: Re: HighLine and Readline

On 8/3/07, Ari Brown <ari@aribrown.com> wrote:
> Hey,
>
> Good news:
>
> In my quest for buffer a user's input serverside, I have found an
> answer (which is rather easy).
> Oh, and I got HighLine working over sockets.
>
> I need to use HighLine::Question with the Readline attribute.
>
> But unfortunately, according to the documentation I found, using the
> readline attribute will make readline be a ruby-rebel and use it's
> own input and output streams ($stdin and $stdout,  I assume).
>
> So my question is this: How can I make the readline attribute use
> specific input and output streams?
>
> I'm imaging something like this (it is probably waaaaaaay wrong):
>
> a = HighLine.new(@sock, @sock)
> a.ask("monkey? ") {|q| q.readline(@sock, @sock) }

Here's the relevant source, as you can see it ignores your input stream.
I'll leave it to James to comment further, but I'm sure we wouldn't
mind making it easier to handle what you're trying to do if it can be
done easily enough.

 #
  # Read a line of input from the input stream and process whitespace as
  # requested by the Question object.
  #
  # If Question's _readline_ property is set, that library will be used to
  # fetch input.  *WARNING*:  This ignores the currently set input stream.
  #
  # Raises EOFError if input is exhausted.
  #
  def get_line(  )
    if @question.readline
      require "readline"    # load only if needed

      # capture say()'s work in a String to feed to readline()
      old_output = @output
      @output    = StringIO.new
      say(@question)
      question = @output.string
      @output  = old_output

      # prep auto-completion
      completions              = @question.selection.abbrev
      Readline.completion_proc = lambda { |string| completions[string] }

      # work-around ugly readline() warnings
      old_verbose = $VERBOSE
      $VERBOSE    = nil
      answer      = @question.change_case(
                        @question.remove_whitespace(
                            Readline.readline(question, true) ) )
      $VERBOSE    = old_verbose

      answer
    else
      raise EOFError, "The input stream is exhausted." if @input.eof?

      @question.change_case(@question.remove_whitespace(@input.gets))
    end
  end