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!

Answer 1

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 )