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Question

How to get nice formatting in the Rails console

Answer 1

+1 A:

You might want to define ProductColor's inspect method to return something that you find nice. For example:

def inspect
  "<#{id} - #{name} (#{internal_name})>"
end

After which the result of ProductColor.all will display as something like [<1 - White (White)>, ...]. Of course you should adjust the inspect method to your needs, so that it displays all the information you need in a style that you like.

Edit: also if the issue was the lack of line breaks in the output, you might try

require 'pp'
pp ProductColor.all

which should insert linebreaks where appropriate

sepp2k 2009-08-03 20:57:36

Answer 2

+6 A:

The y method is a handy way to get some pretty YAML output.

y ProductColor.all

Assuming you are in script/console

ryanb 2009-08-04 02:09:37

Answer 3

+8 A:

You should try hirb. It's a gem made to to pretty format objects in the ruby console. Your script/console session would look like this:

>> require 'hirb'
=> true
>> Hirb.enable
=> true
>> ProductColor.first
+----+-------+---------------+---------------------+---------------------+
| id | name  | internal_name | created_at          | updated_at          |
+----+-------+---------------+---------------------+---------------------+
| 1  | White | White         | 2009-06-10 04:02:44 | 2009-06-10 04:02:44 |
+----+-------+---------------+---------------------+---------------------+
1 row in set
=> true

You can learn more about hirb at its homepage.

2009-08-04 06:57:51

ryanb's answer is basically what I was looking for, but this is too cool not to accept.

Horace Loeb 2009-08-04 17:46:33

While not an answer to the original question, it might be pointing out that you can add the hirb stuff to your ~/.irbrc so you don't have to require and enable it each time.

jordelver 2010-10-04 12:13:59

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How to get nice formatting in the Rails console

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