From: Ronald Fischer <ronald.fischer@...>
Date: 2007-08-07T18:09:36+09:00
Subject: Re: Feature request (pretty_inspect variant, yielding single quotes instead of double)

> You would have to also explain how embedded control characters will be
> printed because there is no way I know of at the moment that would
> allow to embed e.g. a newline in a single quote string:

Good point. I overlooked this. But there are easy workarounds. For
example,
pretty_inspectq could revert to double quotation if the string to be
printed
can not be formatted using single quotes. Or (remember that I don't want
to change the default behaviour of pretty_inspect) an exception is
thrown in
this case, which makes sense: The user requests pretty_inspecting in
single
quotes, but if it is not possible, we should blame the user.

> If you introduce a new syntax 

Certainly not! I don't want to open *that* can of worms.

> Btw, there is another variant for switching between single and double
> quotes: you can use a global variable.  This has the advantage that
> you do not need to touch any #inspect implementation of custom classes
> - but comes at a price of course.

Hmmmmm.... here I don't see the point.

In my case, I use pretty_inspect to "marshal" Ruby data types (they
are written to a file, which is then edited by the user, and finally
eval'ed by another Ruby application). I use pretty_inspect to easily
format Ruby structures (arrays...), but for the user, it is more
convenient
to use single quoted strings when editing the data, because he needs
to care less about escaping rules.

Ronald