From: Justin Collins <justincollins@...>
Date: 2010-10-04T12:43:15+09:00
Subject: Re: How to suppress display of specific code in irb??

On 10/03/2010 07:33 PM, Don Norcott wrote:
> I am very new to ruby (but a retired experienced C programmer) and am
> getting buried in the amount of documentation available. Have been
> unable to find an answer to this question, but perhaps do not understand
> the concepts involved enough to search correctly.  Given this code
>
> require 'hpricot'
> url = "http://www....."
> doc = Hpricot.XML(open(url))
>
> In interactive ruby can I suppress the output produced by
>     Hpricot.XML(open(url))
>
> is this the stdout stream or is it something else? At completion the
> HTML is in the doc object so is there any need for it to also be
> displayed. Perhaps the object has a means of suppressing the data being
> loaded?
>
> I am working with web pages and a very large amount of data is involved.
> When I mark and copy the irb window to a file to do searches on the data
> I have a lot of unneeded and duplicated data.  Perhaps there are IRB
> parameters to resolve this
>
> I know I can redirect to a file then use the file (but still have same
> problem when opening file for processing), but what I would like to do
> is the equivalent of redirecting stdout (if it is stdout) to NULL on a
> per line basis.
>
> Thanks RustySam
>    

What you could do is simply append "; nil" to the end of the line:

irb(main):001:0> s = "some really, really long string" ; nil
=> nil


-Justin