Putting the results of pp (or anything outputted to console) into a string

Question

We know

require \'pp\'
a=[\"value1\", \"value2\", \"value3\"]
pp a

pretty prints the array as an output to the console. How do I get that p

Answer 1

If you want to save the output into a string, you can use stringio

Here is an example:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'stringio'
require 'pp'

def output_to_string
  sio = StringIO.new
  old_stdout, $stdout = $stdout, sio
  yield
  $stdout = old_stdout # restore stdout
  sio.string
end

result = output_to_string do
  puts "hello"
  pp ["value1", "value2", "value3"]
end

puts "result: #{result}"

If you exec this code you get:

result: hello
["value1", "value2", "value3"]