Viewing RI in a web browser

December 29, 2008

I’m a big fan of the Firefox keyword search. For example I have keywords for LEO, Wikipedia and Man pages. Sometimes I want to look up API documentation in Ruby and typing ri camelize into the address bar and viewing the documentation as web page seems to be quite natural for me. So I wrote a quick and dirty cgi, which calls RI and outputs HTML.

CGI script

I’ve put the following code in file named /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ri.b. This is the default location for cgi scripts on my system for Apache.

  1. #!/usr/bin/env ruby
  3. require 'rdoc/ri/ri_driver'
  4. require 'rubygems'
  6. print "Content-type: text/html\r\n\r\n"
  8. ARGV << '-f' << 'html'
  10. ri = RiDriver.new
  12. print '<html><body style="width:600px; margin:auto; padding:20px">'
  13. ri.process_args
  14. print '</body></html>'

This script does the same thing as if you typed ri somequery -f html. I put some HTML around it to give it some style, but that’s it.

The Keyword Search

So I want to type ri String.capitalize and the browser should send a request to http://localhost/cgi-bin/ri.rb?String.capitalize.

Just add a new bookmark and give it the keyword ri and use as url this one:

 http://localhost/cgi-bin/ri.rb?%s

Now we’re done. One thing I would like to improve is to add hyperlinks to the output. For example viewing the documentation of a class brings up all documented methods. Each of them should be a link to the actual documentation. Probably some monkey patching on the HtmlFormatter class would do the job.

Posted in category Ruby by Matthias Georgi. Tagged with ri, firefox, search.
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Matthias Georgi Berlin, Germany

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