Suppress result output in irb?

ruby-talk
1

Hi,

Is there a way to prevent irb from printing the result of a expression to the terminal on a command-by-command basis? I'm trying to use irb and soap4r to play around with a SOAP server and in many cases the results are fairly long arrays; I'd like to be able to prevent these from being displayed automatically. IPython, for example, will suppress the output from a command if it's terminated with a semicolon (';'). I was hoping for something similar in irb.

Thanks,

Tom

2

Tom Pollard wrote:

Is there a way to prevent irb from printing the result of a
expression to the terminal on a command-by-command basis? I'm trying
to use irb and soap4r to play around with a SOAP server and in many
cases the results are fairly long arrays; I'd like to be able to
prevent these from being displayed automatically. IPython, for
example, will suppress the output from a command if it's terminated
with a semicolon (';'). I was hoping for something similar in irb.

For me, with irb 0.9.5(05/04/13) and ruby 1.8.5 (2006-08-25)
[i386-cygwin], a trailing semicolon _does_ suppress printing the result.

3

Tom Pollard wrote:

Hi,

Is there a way to prevent irb from printing the result of a expression to the terminal on a command-by-command basis? I'm trying to use irb and soap4r to play around with a SOAP server and in many cases the results are fairly long arrays; I'd like to be able to prevent these from being displayed automatically. IPython, for example, will suppress the output from a command if it's terminated with a semicolon (';'). I was hoping for something similar in irb.

irb(main):002:0> "q"*1000; 0
=> 0

···

--
       vjoel : Joel VanderWerf : path berkeley edu : 510 665 3407

4

Tom Pollard asked:

Is there a way to prevent irb from printing the result of a
expression to the terminal on a command-by-command basis? I'm trying
to use irb and soap4r to play around with a SOAP server and in many
cases the results are fairly long arrays; I'd like to be able to
prevent these from being displayed automatically. IPython, for
example, will suppress the output from a command if it's terminated
with a semicolon (';'). I was hoping for something similar in irb.

rickhg12hs responded:

For me, with irb 0.9.5(05/04/13) and ruby 1.8.5 (2006-08-25)
[i386-cygwin], a trailing semicolon _does_ suppress printing the result.

Thanks for the quick response.

When I try that (with the same version of irb, but ruby 1.8.4), irb gives me the "waiting for you to finish the command" prompt.

>> 7+8
=> 15
>> 7+8;
?>

Are you sure that's not what you're getting, too?

Tom

5

Thanks. (I feel silly for not having thought of that last night.) It's much better than nothing.

But, is there a good reason why irb itself couldn't suppress the display of the results when you gave it a command with a trailing semicolon? I don't see how that would break anything.

Tom

···

On Oct 5, 2006, at 2:44 AM, Joel VanderWerf wrote:

Tom Pollard wrote:

Hi,
Is there a way to prevent irb from printing the result of a expression to the terminal on a command-by-command basis? I'm trying to use irb and soap4r to play around with a SOAP server and in many cases the results are fairly long arrays; I'd like to be able to prevent these from being displayed automatically. IPython, for example, will suppress the output from a command if it's terminated with a semicolon (';'). I was hoping for something similar in irb.

irb(main):002:0> "q"*1000; 0
=> 0