From: Josh Cheek <josh.cheek@...>
Date: 2009-10-21T00:01:39+09:00
Subject: Re: recursive function problem

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On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 9:30 AM, Aurora S.r.l.
<desantis.maurizio@gmail.com>wrote:

> > I don't really know how to read the docs, but this seems like the kind
> > of
> > thing that I would expect the pp library to do for us. I tried about 15
> > different ways to get it to do this, and only ever got the same as the
> > default p function. If pp does address this issue, can someone explain
> > how
> > to get it to work?
>
> Bravo!!!
>
> I come from PHP and my first need was a function similar to print_r() (I
> develop with Rails 2 now), so I just started (very lazily :-) ) to write
> it... and you are giving me the code, written with a ruby philosophy!
> Many thanks!!!!! Anyway, it's less bizarre that a such modern language
> doesn't implement in native libraries these prehistorical functions, I
> think...
> --
> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
>
>
Well, if you just need to look at it, inspect usually works. It's just when
you get long lists or lots of nesting, using inspect sometimes still isn't
enough. I really think that pp should do it, but can't figure out how.

If I were doing it, myself, I would monkey patch it into the hash class,
something like this:

class Hash
  def readable( tabs_num = -1 )
    tabs_num += 1
    self.inject(String.new)do | str , ( key , value ) |
      rhs =   value.is_a?(Hash)  ?  "\n#{value.readable tabs_num}"  :
"#{value.inspect}\n"
      str << "#{"\t" * tabs_num}#{key.inspect} => #{rhs}"
    end
  end
end

params = { :abc => 'def' , 3 => {1=>true,2=>{'xyz'=>/xyz/}} , 5 => 5 }
puts params.readable

But some people here hate monkey patching, so I didn't post that earlier.

Also, I found that YAML gives something very similar to what we are doing
here, with

require 'yaml'
puts params.to_yaml

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