How to get nice formatting in the Rails console

ruby-on-rails irb
Tom Lehman picture Tom Lehman · Aug 3, 2009 · Viewed 63k times · Source

I want to get something like this to look nice:

>> ProductColor.all
=> [#<ProductColor id: 1, name: "White", internal_name: "White", created_at: "2009-06-10 04:02:44", updated_at: "2009-06-10 04:02:44">, #<ProductColor id: 2, name: "Ivory", internal_name: "Ivory", created_at: "2009-06-10 04:02:44", updated_at: "2009-06-10 04:02:44">, #<ProductColor id: 3, name: "Blue", internal_name: "Light Blue", created_at: "2009-06-10 04:02:44", updated_at: "2009-06-10 04:02:44">, #<ProductColor id: 4, name: "Green", internal_name: "Green", created_at: "2009-06-10 04:02:44", updated_at: "2009-06-10 04:02:44">]

This doesn't work:

>> ProductColor.all.inspect
=> "[#<ProductColor id: 1, name: \"White\", internal_name: \"White\", created_at: \"2009-06-10 04:02:44\", updated_at: \"2009-06-10 04:02:44\">, #<ProductColor id: 2, name: \"Ivory\", internal_name: \"Ivory\", created_at: \"2009-06-10 04:02:44\", updated_at: \"2009-06-10 04:02:44\">, #<ProductColor id: 3, name: \"Blue\", internal_name: \"Light Blue\", created_at: \"2009-06-10 04:02:44\", updated_at: \"2009-06-10 04:02:44\">, #<ProductColor id: 4, name: \"Green\", internal_name: \"Green\", created_at: \"2009-06-10 04:02:44\", updated_at: \"2009-06-10 04:02:44\">]"

And neither does this:

>> ProductColor.all.to_yaml
=> "--- \n- !ruby/object:ProductColor \n  attributes: \n    name: White\n    created_at: 2009-06-10 04:02:44\n    updated_at: 2009-06-10 04:02:44\n    id: \"1\"\n    internal_name: White\n  attributes_cache: {}\n\n- !ruby/object:ProductColor \n  attributes: \n    name: Ivory\n    created_at: 2009-06-10 04:02:44\n    updated_at: 2009-06-10 04:02:44\n    id: \"2\"\n    internal_name: Ivory\n  attributes_cache: {}\n\n- !ruby/object:ProductColor \n  attributes: \n    name: Blue\n    created_at: 2009-06-10 04:02:44\n    updated_at: 2009-06-10 04:02:44\n    id: \"3\"\n    internal_name: Light Blue\n  attributes_cache: {}\n\n- !ruby/object:ProductColor \n  attributes: \n    name: Green\n    created_at: 2009-06-10 04:02:44\n    updated_at: 2009-06-10 04:02:44\n    id: \"4\"\n    internal_name: Green\n  attributes_cache: {}\n\n"

Thoughts?

Answer

ryanb picture ryanb · Aug 4, 2009

The y method is a handy way to get some pretty YAML output.

y ProductColor.all

Assuming you are in script/console

As jordanpg commented, this answer is outdated. For Rails 3.2+ you need to execute the following code before you can get the y method to work:

YAML::ENGINE.yamler = 'syck'

From ruby-docs

In older Ruby versions, ie. <= 1.9, Syck is still provided, however it was completely removed with the release of Ruby 2.0.0.

For rails 4/ruby 2 you could use just

puts object.to_yaml

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