Ruby

Run the Ruby examples calling byexample as:

$ byexample -l ruby your-file-here                # byexample: +skip

You need the default interpreter irb installed first. Check its download page

Stability: provisional - low impact non backward compatibility changes may occur between versions; but in general a change like that will happen only between major versions.

Versions tested

We tested byexample with the following versions of the language and the underlying runner or interpreter:

Language	Runner/Interpreter
2.4	0.9.6
2.5	0.9.6
2.6	1.0.0
2.7	1.2.6
3.0	1.3.5
3.1	1.4.1

Find interactive examples

For Ruby, byexample uses the >> string as the primary prompt and .. as the secondary prompt.

>> a = 1
>> b = 2
>> a + b
=> 3

>> def g(a, b, c)
..     c += a
..     c += b
..
..     return c
.. end

>> g(1, 2, 3)
=> 6

Pretty print

byexample changes the default IRB’s inspector and uses pp (pretty print).

If you want, you can use the IRB’s default one with the option -ruby-pretty-print

>> {3=>{5=>Array(0..20), 4=>"aaaaaaaa"}, 1 => 2}
=> {1=>2,
 3=>
  {4=>"aaaaaaaa",
   5=>
    [0,
     1,
     <...>
     19,
     20]}}

Changed in byexample 8.0.0: make sure that a Hash is printed in a deterministic way with its keys sorted. Before byexample 8.0.0 the order was undefined.

Changed in byexample 10.0.4: IRB > 1.2.2 adds a newline between the => marker and the output if it spans more than one line. To maintain backward compatibility byexample will suppress that newline by default. If you don’t want that you can pass +ruby-start-large-output-in-new-line flag in the command line with -o.

The object returned

Because everything in Ruby is an expression, everything returns a result.

This is annoying if you want to write several Ruby lines without checking the results.

For this reason, byexample suppress the representation of the object returned unless the example has a =>.

In the following case, the result of each expression is not printed and therefor they are not checked:

>> 1 + 2

>> puts "hello"
hello

Now, compare it with this. It is the same example but the objects returned are checked too.

>> 1 + 2
=> 3

>> puts "hello"
hello
=> nil

If you want to check all the expressions, you can force to print all the objects returned using the +ruby-expr-print=true.

On the other hand, you can disable it forever with +ruby-expr-print=false.

The default is +ruby-expr-print=auto.

Ruby specific options

$ byexample -l ruby --show-options       # byexample: +norm-ws
<...>
ruby's specific options
-----------------------
<...>:
  +ruby-pretty-print    enable the pretty print enhancement.
  +ruby-expr-print {auto,true,false}
                        print the expression's value (true); suppress it
                        (false); or print it only if the example has a =>
                        (auto, the default)
  +ruby-start-large-output-in-new-line
                        add a newline after the => if the output that follows
                        does not fit in a single line. (irb >= 1.2.2)
<...>