Inspect with limited recursion

Question

I'd like to run inspect on some object, but unfortunately it's either linking to some really big objects, or has a circular reference. That results in many pages of output.

Is there some way to limit the level of recursion that inspect is allowed to do?

Answer 1

No, you might want to use either prettyprint module for a 'different' visualisation (require 'pp'; pp object) or write something yourself. To write a generic dumper is quite difficult since everyone has different needs (dump binary blobs? dump strings up to which length? dump graphs with cycles? dump up to which level? ...).

Answer 2

I think you're going to have to change the behaviour of #inspect for your object. If you understand your objects, it shouldn't be too hard:

class Array
  def inspect
    puts "This is an array, size=#{size}"
  end
end

a = [1,2,3]

puts a.inspect #=> This is an array, size=3