highline's Introduction

Read Me¶ ↑

by James Edward Gray II

Description¶ ↑

Welcome to HighLine.

HighLine was designed to ease the tedious tasks of doing console input and output with low-level methods like gets() and puts(). HighLine provides a robust system for requesting data from a user, without needing to code all the error checking and validation rules and without needing to convert the typed Strings into what your program really needs. Just tell HighLine what you’re after, and let it do all the work.

Documentation¶ ↑

See HighLine and HighLine::Question for documentation.

Start hacking in your code with HighLine with:

require 'highline/import'

Examples¶ ↑

Basic usage:

ask("Company?  ") { |q| q.default = "none" }

Validation:

ask("Age?  ", Integer) { |q| q.in = 0..105 }
ask("Name?  (last, first)  ") { |q| q.validate = /\A\w+, ?\w+\Z/ }

Type conversion for answers:

ask("Birthday?  ", Date)
ask("Interests?  (comma sep list)  ", lambda { |str| str.split(/,\s*/) })

Reading passwords:

ask("Enter your password:  ") { |q| q.echo = false }
ask("Enter your password:  ") { |q| q.echo = "x" }

ERb based output (with HighLine’s ANSI color tools):

say("This should be <%= color('bold', BOLD) %>!")

Menus:

choose do |menu|
  menu.prompt = "Please choose your favorite programming language?  "

  menu.choice(:ruby) { say("Good choice!") }
  menu.choices(:python, :perl) { say("Not from around here, are you?") }
end