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rubyirb

Copy paste from irb excluding prompt at start of line?

When copy/pasting from irb to an .rb file the start of each line should be removed.

A short example, say you copy this from irb:

irb(main):049:1* def thing(x, y)
irb(main):050:1*   out = x * y 
irb(main):051:1*   puts out
irb(main):052:0> end
=> :thing
irb(main):053:0> thing(2, 3)
6
=> nil

it would be handy to paste only this:

def thing(x, y)
  out = x * y 
  puts out
end
=> :thing
thing(2, 3)
6
=> nil

Is there any special copy/paste command to achieve this, either already built into irb, available through some sort of extension, or even operating system shortcut (running macOS)?

What I tried

  • A regular expression could be used to remove the prompts, but it's not ideal since it assumes the paste will be into a text editor with find and replace with regex.

  • Although completely unrelated to rails, Google Docs, has a convention of cmd + shift + paste to 'paste without formatting'. I'm after something similar for irb like 'copy without prompt'.

Note: I'm using the macOS terminal (zsh)

Solution

  • You can hold the ⌥ Option key and drag for a rectangular selection:

    You can also customize IRB's prompt. Here's an example of the built-in --noprompt option which provides a blank prompt: