How to read this

Ruby
1

I was recently looking to compute a sha1 hash in ruby, and l luckily
google turned up a quick example because I found the digest docs here
RDoc Documentation very cryptic and difficult to read.

How am I to interpret what I see in the digest api docs? There’s no
example, not even an obvious entry point. How do I look at that doc
and know what I need to “require” and then what classes I’ll be using
to accomplish my task?

Luckily this dude and google to the rescue
http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/83.

Mike

2

I have usually found that either the base class or file usually have the
details for usage. I admit the digest class docs are a bit sparse but
they
are there.

http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/digest/rdoc/classes/Digest/Class.html

It shows an example for both a string and a file. As for the require, I
usually just require the file or folder at the base of the list of
files. In
this case it is ‘digest’.

3

Sven S. wrote:

http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/digest/rdoc/classes/Digest/Class.html

It shows an example for both a string and a file.

You can also build up a digest iteratively:

require ‘digest/sha1’
d = Digest::SHA1.new
d << “hello”
d << " world"
puts d.hexdigest # or d.digest for binary

4

On Nov 6, 4:12 pm, Sven S. [email protected] wrote:

I have usually found that either the base class or file usually have the
details for usage. I admit the digest class docs are a bit sparse but they
are there.

Yeah, sort of. No hard example for SHA1, but you can replace Class
with SHA1 and you’re good I suppose.

I tried modifying the digest.rb file in my source tarball and re-
running “rdoc --ri” over the whole tree, and it did not capture my
rdoc at all. If I run “ri Digest” it finds nothing.

If I instead cd into the directory containing the digest.rb file and
run “rdoc --ri” then it gets picked up. I was hoping to submit a patch
with better docs, but I’m curious as to why my rdoc wasn’t picked up
if I run it at the top level of the source tree. Any ideas?

make install-doc basically runs “rdoc --ri”, and it didn’t pick up my
changes either.

Mike