Difference between p in a rails view and puts

Question

I am a newbie in Rails. I created a controller and a action. In the corresponding view I used <%= puts "asd" %> once and <%= p "asd" %> the other time.

In case id puts it shows on the console and in case of p it is rendered as HTML. What is the possible reason?

Answer 1

puts calls the method to_s p calls the method inspect

class Foo
  def to_s
    "In #to_s"
  end
  def inspect
    "In #inspect"
  def
def

Semantically, to_s is meant to output the representation of the object to the user, and inspect to hint about the internal properties of the object (kinda like python's repr), but that's just a convention.

If you want to inspect something in your HTML use <%= debug "something" %>

Answer 2

I think you'll find that the p method outputs to the console as well, but the reason why it's "rendered as HTML" is because the p method returns the value passed in, where puts does not.

p is the shorter version of puts something.inspect and is very useful for debugging and that's about it. For outputting strings to the console, it's more preferrable to use puts.