Subject: Re: Printing contents of a method
From: Dave Thomas <dave@pragprog.com>



On Jul 13, 2004, at 13:43, Nate Smith wrote:


> On Tue, 2004-07-13 at 14:24, Dave Thomas wrote: Does anyone know how to actually print (as a string) the contents of a given method? I've googled and searched books, to no avail. Thanks much for any help
>
> Might SCRIPT_LINES help? (if the method is loaded into your program after it starts)
>
> Forgive me if I sound stupid, but what is SCRIPT_LINES? I search google for it and it only came up with Perl references, and a couple of emails that you wrote which had the word in it. Thanks!
>

Here's some stuff from the new pickaxe:

SCRIPT_LINES__ (Hash)

If a constant SCRIPT_LINES__ is defined and references a Hash at the time Ruby is compiling code, Ruby will store an entry containing the contents of each file it parses, with the file’s name as the key and an array of strings as the value. See Kernel.require on page ?? for an example.

and then over in Kernel.require:

The SCRIPT_LINES__ constant can be used to capture the source of code read using require.

SCRIPT_LINES__ = {} require 'code/scriptlines' puts "Files: #{SCRIPT_LINES__.keys.join(', ')}" SCRIPT_LINES__['./code/scriptlines.rb'].each do |line| puts "Source: #{line}" end

produces:

3/8 Files: ./code/scriptlines.rb, /Users/dave/ruby1.8/lib/ruby/1.8/rational.rb Source: require 'rational' Source: Source: puts Rational(1,2)*Rational(3,4)

(where code/scriptlines.rb does indeed contain the three lines of code listed above).



Cheers

Dave