Clear screen

ruby-talk
1

Is there a way to clear the terminal screen by using Ruby directly?
Instead of using system("clear").

Cheers
Christian

2

Nothing builtin. A lighter approach is to print an ANSI escape sequence if your terminal understands it:

   module Screen
     def self.clear
       print "\e[2J\e[f"
     end
   end

-- fxn

···

On Apr 26, 2007, at 8:25 AM, Christian wrote:

Is there a way to clear the terminal screen by using Ruby directly?
Instead of using system("clear").

3

Christian,

The following is a hack: I checked, and on my system, "clear" sends the following control characters to the screen: ^[[H^[[2J

This will only work on unix, and I'm not sure whether it works on all terminals, but

puts "\e[H\e[2J"

clears the screen. You might want to use "if $stdout.isatty" so that you don't get control characters in an output file...

Note that this is pretty much exactly the same thing as system("clear"). If that's not good enough, you probably want to look at terminal libraries--I think ruby-termios might be useful, but I have no experience with it.

Dan

Christian wrote:

···

Is there a way to clear the terminal screen by using Ruby directly?
Instead of using system("clear").

Cheers
Christian

4

Thanks a lot. I will stick to the escape characters because I also
need to set the cursor position.

Cheers
Christian

5

You may want to check out the Ruby ncurses project:
http://ncurses-ruby.berlios.de/

Gary Wright

···

On Apr 26, 2007, at 10:00 AM, Christian wrote:

Thanks a lot. I will stick to the escape characters because I also
need to set the cursor position.