Nicely formats debugging puts and pp statements in Textmate (for Rspec).

Sometimes you need to do things like this:

puts "Let's see what is going on here..."
pp MyClass.new

And usually see just this on the screen:

Let's see what is going on here...
#

You can right-click to inspect element, but that's a pain.

Drop the textmate_puts_helper.rb in your spec folder

require 'textmate_puts_helper'

Watch as your objects appear as you would expect:

If you define a method 'pp' on any class instance, this will be used when using 'pp'.

For instance, I have a bunch of datamapper classes, and I want to see them in a nice format, so I do this:

module PrettyPrinter
  def self.included(c)
    c.class_eval do
      def pp *args
        puts JSON.pretty_generate(self.as_json)
      end
    end
  end
end

And in my class I add

class MyClass < DataMapper::Resource
  include PrettyPrinter
  ...

I can then do this in spec:

it "should have a programmer who understands what is going on in a strange scenario" do
  confusion = MyClass.create(:emotion => "confused", :description => "oddness")
  pp confusion
  confusion.should_not be_blank
end

and see this output in the Textmate rspec window:

{
  'id' => 1,
  'description' => "oddness",
  'emotion' => "confused"
}

Hope this is of some use to someone!