Including source in RDoc

Ruby
1

Hi,

There was a Ruby Q. on literate programming a little while back,
but I couldn’t quite find an answer to my problem there, so I’m
coming to the group.

I’m writing some small example scripts to demo my library, and I’d
like a way of including the source of these scripts in the
documentation generated by RDoc. Trouble is, I can’t see anyway of
telling RDoc to include the source in the generated HTML, so my
options seem to be:

  1. Include a copy of the source in the comments of the same file
    (simple, but seems a bit un-DRY-ish)
  2. Comment the code (so RDoc sees it) and then post-process the file
    when the script is run.

I’ve implemented the second option as shown in the foo.rb file below.
When run directly, it evals anything indented by two or more spaces
as Ruby code. Other comments are left alone. When RDoc sees it it
treats the code as pre-formatted text. It all feels a bit hacky
though. My questions is: ‘Is there a better way?’.

[alexg@powerbook]/Users/alexg/Desktop(21): cat foo.rb
#RDoc documentation
#Here is the Foo class. It doesn’t do much.

class Foo

def bar

puts ‘bar’

end

end

#All you can do is call bar on it as shown:

Foo.new.bar

if FILE == $0
eval(IO.read($0).gsub(/^#\s\s/,’’))
end
[alexg@powerbook]/Users/alexg/Desktop(22): ruby foo.rb
bar
[alexg@powerbook]/Users/alexg/Desktop(23): rdoc -f xml foo.rb

                          foo.rb:

Generating XML…

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> foo.rb Thu Jan 11 17:27:34 +0900 2007 
 <description>

RDoc documentation Here is the Foo class. It doesn‘t do much. 

   class Foo
     def bar
       puts 'bar'
     end
   end

All you can do is call bar on it as shown: 

   Foo.new.bar

 </description>
 <contents>
  </contents>
Files: 1 Classes: 0 Modules: 0 Methods: 0 Elapsed: 0.214s

Alex G.

Bioinformatics Center
Kyoto University

2

Alle 09:39, giovedì 11 gennaio 2007, Alex G. ha scritto:

options seem to be:
though. My questions is: ‘Is there a better way?’.

Foo.new.bar

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

RDoc documentation Here is the Foo class. It doesn‘t do much.

Bioinformatics Center Kyoto University

In my opinion, there’s also a third option: instead of postprocessing
the
script when it’s run, preprocess the file when you generate the
documentation. Instead of generating the doc directly using rdoc, use a
script which turns the parts you want included into comments. This is a
simple attempt at doing it:
[file generate_rdoc.rb]

require ‘tempfile’
require ‘rdoc/rdoc’

def format_sources lines
to_format=false
begin_regexp=/^#BEGIN_RDOC_SOURCE$/
end_regexp=/^#END_RDOC_SOURCE$/
formatted=lines.map do |l|
if to_format and !l.match end_regexp then “##{l}”
elsif to_format and l.match end_regexp
to_format=false
nil
elsif l.match begin_regexp
to_format=true
nil
else l
end
end
formatted.compact
end

if $0==FILE
lines=File.readlines(‘demo.rb’)
Tempfile.open(‘demo’) do |f|
f.write format_sources(lines).join("#\n")
f.flush
RDoc::RDoc.new.document([f.path])
end
end

This script takes the demo.rb file, creates a temp file where the text
included between #BEGIN_RDOC_SOURCE and #END_RDOC_SOURCE commnents is
commented, then runs rdoc on it. For instance, the demo.rb file could
look
like this

[file demo.rb]

A class whose source you don’t want to appear in the doc

class A
…
end

#A class whose source you want in the doc
#BEGIN_RDOC_SOURCE
class B
…
end
#END_RDOC_SOURCE

The temp file will be:

[temp file]

A class whose source you don’t want to appear in the doc

class A
…
end

#A class whose source you want in the doc
#class B
#…
#end

If you want something more complex, you of course need a more advanced
script,
but, in my opinion, this is the best way to go, expecially taking into
account the fact that, being demo files, your users may want to look
into
them to understand how to use the library, and they may be confused to
find
the body of the script commented out.

I hope this helps

Stefano

3

On Thu, 2007-01-11 at 19:04 +0900, Stefano C. wrote:

In my opinion, there’s also a third option: instead of postprocessing the
script when it’s run, preprocess the file when you generate the
documentation. Instead of generating the doc directly using rdoc, use a
script which turns the parts you want included into comments. This is a
simple attempt at doing it:

I suppose another (though not immediate) option would be to make a
request to modify RDoc to accomplish this, or do it yourself and submit
a patch.

I don’t know much about the RDoc layout, but I would think that a change
so that you had a series of start/stop tags that don’t interfere with
code, but allow for documentation processing:

def func1
…
end

START DOC PROCESSING

def func 2
…
end

END DOC PROCESSING

should allow for the code to remain unchanged, and a properly modified
RDoc could still process this into documentation.

Matt