Redirecting CGI#out to a string

Ruby
1

Hi All

For my first “production” ruby app, I’m writing a self contained web
interface to the TSM backup product, based on some existing, awful,
perl code. I’m using webrick because the number of requests will be
small, and I want it cross platform and as self-contained as possible.

I’d prefer to generate my html using the CGI class, but webrick needs a
string to be returned and CGI#out writes to standard output.

I’ve played with redirecting $stdout to a StringIO object, but haven’t
been able to get that to work, and also that doesn’t seem to be the
Ruby way, its more Perl-ish.

Can some kind soul please point me in the right direction?

TIA

Steve.

AIX and TSM Administrator
Brisbane Australia

2

On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 11:05:01 -0000, [email protected] wrote:

I’d prefer to generate my html using the CGI class, but webrick needs a
string to be returned and CGI#out writes to standard output.

I’ve not used CGI much myself, but a quick experiment yielded this:

require 'cgi'

cgi = CGI.new('html4')
html = cgi.html do
  cgi.body do
    cgi.pre do
      "Don't use 'out'"
    end
  end
end

# Now you can do what you want with it, for example:
puts CGI.pretty(html.gsub(/<([^!][^>]*)>/) { "<#{$1.downcase}>" })

Outputs:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"

“http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd”>




Don’t use ‘out’


I don’t know if it’s the best tool for your task, but anyway I hope that
helps…