class RubyLLM::Citation

A Citation links a span of generated text to the source material that supports it. Providers return citations in different shapes. RubyLLM normalizes all of them into Citation objects on Message#citations. Fields a provider does not report are nil.

chat = RubyLLM.chat(model: 'claude-sonnet-4-5').with_citations
response = chat.ask "Who created Ruby?", with: "facts.txt"

response.citations.each do |citation|
  citation.title      # => "facts.txt"
  citation.cited_text # => the quoted passage from facts.txt
  citation.text       # => the span of the answer it supports
end

Attributes

cited_text [R]

The quoted snippet from the source material, or nil.

end_index [R]

The character offset where the cited span ends in the response content, or nil.

end_page [R]

The last page of a PDF citation (1-indexed, inclusive), or nil.

source_index [R]

The 0-indexed position of the source document or search result, or nil.

start_index [R]

The character offset where the cited span starts in the response content, or nil.

response.content[citation.start_index...citation.end_index] == citation.text # => true

start_page [R]

The first page of a PDF citation (1-indexed, inclusive), or nil.

text [R]

The span of the response content this citation supports, or nil.

title [R]

The title or filename of the cited source, or nil.

url [R]

The URL of the cited source, when citing the web, or nil.

Public Instance Methods

== (other)

Source

# File lib/ruby_llm/citation.rb, line 85
def ==(other)
  other.is_a?(Citation) && to_h == other.to_h
end

Returns true if other is a Citation with the same attributes, false otherwise.

to_h ()

Source

# File lib/ruby_llm/citation.rb, line 69
def to_h
  {
    url: url,
    title: title,
    cited_text: cited_text,
    text: text,
    start_index: start_index,
    end_index: end_index,
    source_index: source_index,
    start_page: start_page,
    end_page: end_page
  }.compact
end

Returns the citation as a Hash with symbol keys, omitting nil fields.