I was working on a parser for a very specific tree structure, and was frustrated that there wasn’t a simple way to parse it in irb. “What??”, I thought. “I have to use my brain?! God forbid!”. So I set to using my brain a little more to create this tool. It’s not much, but maybe it’ll make someone’s life a little easier.

Install: (set up gemcutter)
gem install ListBrowser

It can be used in irb, and really should be used there – when you call it on a tree structure, you’ll get a menu with a list of choices on how you want to go through whatever structure you gave it.

In my particular, special case, I would do something like this:

require ‘sgf_parser’ # For my tree structure require ‘list_browser’ # For this.

tree = SgfParser::Tree.new :filename => “kogo.sgf”

ListBrowser.new tree.root, ‘parent’, ‘children’, ‘properties’

# And follow the menu!

In my particular case, I would not need to enter those strings, as they
just happen to be the names I chose for my tree structure, but they should
serve as a good enough example!