Question

i override the to_s method to get pretty output when i use puts but at the same time i seem to loose my ability to inspect the object. Is there a way to get the normal output of inspect while overriding to_s ?

class Person
  attr_accessor :first, :last, :birthdate
  def initialize(first=nil, last=nil, birthdate=nil)
    @first, @last, @birthdate = first, last, birthdate
  end
  def age
    if birthdate
      Time.now.year-birthdate
    else
      0
    end
  end
  def to_s
    "#{@first} #{@last} (#{age})"
  end
end

me = Person.new("Peter", "Marien", 1962)
p me  >>Peter Marien (50)
p me.inspect  >>"Peter Marien (50)"

#Need #<Person:0x1ec2550 @first="Peter", @last="Marien", @birthdate=1962>

Answer 1

Ruby documentation clearly states, that by default inspect uses to_s as its output.

If you don’t need the address of the object, you could provide your own inspect, to have almost the same behavior:

class Person
  def inspect
    vars = self.instance_variables.
      map{|v| "#{v}=#{instance_variable_get(v).inspect}"}.join(", ")
    "<#{self.class}: #{vars}>"
  end
end

But you could also install a gem called awesome_print that will give very nice output.
First in console:

$ gem install awesome_print

then in irb or your script:

require 'awesome_print'
ap Person.new("John")

There is also a built-in pp library, which have similar purpose. Still it is not immune (at least in Ruby 1.9.2-p290) to overriding of to_s.

A quick example of pp:

require 'pp'
pp Person.new("John")