Printing an array or object in Ruby on rails. Also view the structure of the data

Question

I'm executing an Active Record query in controller. And now I want to view all of its contents weather it is in the form of array or object. I want to see the structure in which the data is being returned. I'm new to ruby on rails. In PHP we use var_dump() or print_r().

Answer 1

Take a look at this doc, 'Debugging Rails Applications', particularly section 3, 'Debugging with ruby-debug': http://guides.rubyonrails.org/debugging_rails_applications.html

Answer 2

There are a couple of ways to do this. If you want to play with the result interactively, open the rails console by typing rails console. Run the query you want in the console

query_result = MyModel.find_by_interesting_parameter( 'Foo' )

Then use the to_yaml method to dump a nice structure out

puts query_result.to_yaml

Sometimes, it's just easier to see what the view has had back. To do this, use the debug method in the view itself...

<%= debug @post %>

See this page here for more information

Answer 3

Try the to_yaml and the inspect methods.