Dr Nic

Awesome tip about the IRBC environment variable on win32, Dr. Nic. Thanks a lot.

You forgot local methods:

class Object
  # Return a list of methods defined locally for a particular object.  Useful
  # for seeing what it does whilst losing all the guff that's implemented
  # by its parents (eg Object).
  def local_methods(obj = self)
    (obj.methods - obj.class.superclass.instance_methods).sort
  end
end

Wow that turned out ugly - if you could edit it to ruby color it that would be greeeeat.

Rob: You can just do object.methods(false). If you pass false into methods, instance_methods, public_instance_methods, etc, it will omit methods defined higher up in the hierarchy.

@rob - <pre> is the magic.

@chris - cool - defn hadn’t noticed that before. One upside to local_methods is that it requires no more typing than a few characters + double-TAB.

Chris: Nope, they do different things. I see that methods(false) has no rdoc in the official api, so I’m not quite sure what the differences are. But just try the two on a ActiveRecord model, for instance.

I think that local_methods keeps things defined in the included modules, whereas methods(false) omits them.

Hi Dr. Nic - thanks for linking to our video, Eric Lake did a great job there with his first ShowMeDo.

We’d love to have some more Ruby content, to go alongside our growing (36+) Python and Java (15+) videos, learning-by-watching seems to work very well for programming/configuration tasks.

Might anyone be interested in having a go? You could be up and running within an hour, all with open-source software and we take care of the heavy-lifting.

Rob: Passing false to methods or any related method omits any methods defined elsewhere. Since local_methods just cuts out instance_methods of the superclass, it won’t really work as intended on classes (for instance) and it won’t catch Modules (as you pointed out).

To Nic’s point, I think I’m going to define local_methods as methods(false) since it is really handy to have the tab-complete locked and loaded.

@chris, so you prefer something like:

class Object
  # Return a list of methods defined locally for a particular object.  Useful
  # for seeing what it does whilst losing all the guff that's implemented
  # by its parents (eg Object).
  def local_methods(obj = self)
    obj.methods(false).sort
  end
end

But this is currently returning an empty array for me @ the moment. I’ve sent you an email and we’ll sort this out

Oh I’m so busted. I think the method you guys are proposing works best. I was thinking exclusively of user-defined classes, which is obviously wrong.

Great stuff. local_methods auto-completes oddly for me, though:

chloe:~ eweaver$ irb
irb(main):001:0> 3.local_methods
irb(main):002:0> “string”.local_methods”

Where’s that double quote coming from? I guess it happens on all methods that don’t have a corresponding ! sibling to block the strange completion.

I can’t get pretty print to work, does it require a gem?

@grant - looks like its std Ruby - pp

Can you get it to work in irb if you you type require 'pp' there?

Perhaps add require 'rubygems' to your .irbrc file.

Brilliant examples on Ruby Forum thread

Hi Dr. Nic, this post is especially useful and I find the wirble gem is nice a nice complement. Just add more 3 lines:

require ‘wirble’
Wirble.init
Wirble.colorize unless Config::CONFIG['host_os'] == ‘mswin32′

Unfortunately, Windows console is color-blinded

Also, I find setting the IRBRC env in Linux is still necessary for Rails console to work as desired, cause it seems to ignore the .irbrc file. Dunno why.

There is a little problem with your quote/backquote mixing

require ‘irb/completion‘
require ‘map_by_method‘
require ‘what_methods‘

You may like Wirble, it enables syntax coloring in irb.

http://pablotron.org/software/wirble/

Thanks, very helpful.

Works the same on Linux Only some distros don’t include headers for curses. See http://blog.nanorails.com/articles/2006/03/06/installing-readline-on-kubuntu

for a fix

Hey, do you guys know of any way to extend readline?
I’ve added some of my own commands to use script/console as an IDE:

http://blog.dominiek.com/articles/2007/03/05/destroying-the-wall-between-writing-and-executing-code

@dodo - I am in love with your .irbrc

BTW, if you want to add active_support to .irbrc, and you use Edge Rails, you must not preload the gem if its a rails console.

So instead of

require 'active_support'

Use:

unless IRB.conf[:LOAD_MODULES].join =~ /config\\/environment/
  require ‘active_support’
end

Until I did this I was getting errors like:

/vendor/rails/railties/lib/dispatcher.rb:94:NoMethodError: undefined method `attr_accessor_with_default' for #<Class:Dispatcher>

I can modify the irbrc file on my windows machine but not on my mac that runs locomotive. I modified irbrc file in both ~/.irbrc and /…bin/.irbrc. Should the irbrc file be be in another location?

@stephaneliu [via] -

parser didn’t like my syntax for second location of irbrc which is in the locomotive home/bin directory.

@stephaneliu [via] - it is funny seeing “@stephaneliu” when you are replying to yourself. I might add “@me” and it could point to the previous comment (which we’d assume was your own).

(I find) another useful method to add to your irbrc is :

def self.load_rails(from=”./”)
require File.expand_path(File.join(from,”config/boot”))
require File.join(RAILS_ROOT, ‘config’, ‘environment’)
end

it loads a rails project into irb, useful if you really should have run ./script/console

@Piggybox [via] -

I’m not sure that’s true. Python has this thing called ipython which seems to work within windows cmd. Dito for cygwin. If someone knows how to make wirble work in windows, that’d be great.

[...] the .irbrc file auto load ruby code when going into irb (the interactive ruby shell. Having a .groovyrc file that gets loaded when [...]