Rails helper to return <li> for each category actually returning hash of categories

Question

I'm trying to clean up my views and be more DRY by using helpers. Starting with what seems like a simple one to return an li for each category.

def showcats
  Category.all.each do |cat|
    content_tag(:li, link_to(cat.title, cat))
  end
end

I've tried calling it in erb and haml using either

<%= showcats %>

or

= showcats

and each time I get back this mess when the page renders:

[#<Category id: 1, title: "First Category", description: "This is the description of the first category", created_at: "2014-02-18 02:05:37", updated_at: "2014-02-18 02:05:37">, #<Category id: 2, title: "Second Category", description: "This is the description of the second category", created_at: "2014-02-18 02:05:37", updated_at: "2014-02-18 02:05:37">,

and so on...

I've tried it with changing the showcats helper to require a variable, and passing that along, like "showcats(@categories)" but the same thing persists. If I put "return" in front of content_tag it will not show the hash of all categories, but it only returns a single category link, which I think is to be expected.

I've read quite a few questions on SO and other places around the web and I can't see where my mistake is. Any advice?

Answer 1

The each function is returning all the categories. So change the each method to map instead.

Answer 2

Replace showcats method as shown below:

def showcats
  Category.all.collect do |cat|
    content_tag(:li, link_to(cat.title, cat))
  end.join.html_safe
end

collect : Returns a new array with the results of running block once for every element in enum whereas,

each : Returns the object on which each is called.