How to suppress the output of return value in IRB/Rails Console?

ruby-on-rails ruby irb
randombits picture randombits · Apr 14, 2012 · Viewed 10.5k times · Source

An example is if I go into IRB and do the following:

jruby-1.6.7 :026 > puts [1,2,3,4,5]
1
2
3
4
5
=> nil

Is there anyway to suppress the nil? The problem is if I put in a large data structure, it spams something an other irrelevant return respond. I'm more interested in seeing output from debug statements I run through a block and have to continually scroll up and look for the real data.

Answer

apeiros picture apeiros · Apr 14, 2012

If you just want to suppress long output once in a while, use ;0, like:

a = [*1..10000];0
# => 0

If you want to suppress it generally, use the ~/.irbrc file. The IRB.conf[:INSPECT_MODE] and IRB.conf[:PROMPT][your_prompt][:RETURN] control what is returned. You can figure out what your_prompt is by checking IRB.conf[:PROMPT_MODE]

Example:

IRB.conf[:PROMPT][:DEFAULT][:RETURN] = "" # suppress return value completely

You'll need to restart irb after changing the value.

Hope that helps.

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