Ruby on Rails: pretty print for variable.hash_set.inspect ... is there a way to pretty print .inpsect in the console?

Question

I findy myself doing a lot of puts .inpsect s in my functional testing to make sure I know how the data is formatted... but hashes are hard to read when there is no new lines after each entry in a hash object. Is there anyway, maybe a gem?, to pretty print hashes?

So that it looks something like this:

{ 
  entry1 => { 
              entrey1.1 => 1,
              entry1.2 => 3
            },
  entry2 => 3
}

instead of: { entry1 => { entrey1.1 => 1, entry1.2 => 3}, entry2 => 3 } ?

Thanks!

score 28 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 16 '15 at 12:46

28

you could use the awesome_print gem for that.

https://github.com/michaeldv/awesome_print

require 'awesome_print' # if you like to have it in irb by default, add it to your irbrc
>> ap({:a => 1, :b => [1,2,3], :c => :d})
{
    :b => [
        [0] 1,
        [1] 2,
        [2] 3
    ],
    :a => 1,
    :c => :d
}

btw, instead of puts object.inspect you can also just use p object which calls inspect in the object before printing it. another way to print objects a little nicer than the default puts is to use pp from the ruby stdlib ( http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/pp/rdoc/index.html )

edited Jun 16 '15 at 12:46

microspino

7,693
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answered Jul 06 '11 at 13:54

Pascal

5,879
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ap is nice however 1.0.2 does not show html nicely - a workaround is to set pre {display:inline} in the css – Kodak Jun 21 '12 at 11:12
1

`pp` is awesome (for a quick solution without needing to install a gem) – gerry3 Apr 10 '14 at 18:18
We can do ```require 'ap'``` instead of ```require 'awesome_print'``` – etlds Jul 10 '14 at 15:24

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 06 '11 at 13:47

You could always redefine Hash#inspect in your .irbrc file if you'd like, format them any way you want. That will only affect your interactive environment. An alternative is to express them as YAML which is often more readable. For instance:

def y(object)
  puts object.to_yaml
  return
end

This way you can run y on objects as you might p today.

Ruby on Rails: pretty print for variable.hash_set.inspect ... is there a way to pretty print .inpsect in the console?

2 Answers2

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