Redirecting CGI#out to a string

ruby-talk
1

Hi All

For my first "production" ruby app, I'm writing a self contained web
interface to the TSM backup product, based on some existing, awful,
perl code. I'm using webrick because the number of requests will be
small, and I want it cross platform and as self-contained as possible.

I'd prefer to generate my html using the CGI class, but webrick needs a
string to be returned and CGI#out writes to standard output.

I've played with redirecting $stdout to a StringIO object, but haven't
been able to get that to work, and also that doesn't seem to be the
Ruby way, its more Perl-ish.

Can some kind soul please point me in the right direction?

TIA

Steve.

AIX and TSM Administrator
Brisbane Australia

2

I've not used CGI much myself, but a quick experiment yielded this:

  require 'cgi'

  cgi = CGI.new('html4')
  html = cgi.html do
    cgi.body do
      cgi.pre do
        "Don't use 'out'"
      end
    end
  end

  # Now you can do what you want with it, for example:
  puts CGI.pretty(html.gsub(/<([^!][^>]*)>/) { "<#{$1.downcase}>" })

Outputs:

  <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd&quot;&gt;
  <html>
    <body>
      <pre>
        Don't use 'out'
      </pre>
    </body>
  </html>

I don't know if it's the best tool for your task, but anyway I hope that helps...

ยทยทยท

On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 11:05:01 -0000, <zyzygy@telstra.com> wrote:

I'd prefer to generate my html using the CGI class, but webrick needs a
string to be returned and CGI#out writes to standard output.

--
Ross Bamford - rosco@roscopeco.remove.co.uk