Is there equivalent for PHP's print_r in Ruby / Rails?

Question

In PHP you can do:

print_r($var) or vardump($var)

which prints "human-readible" information about variable.

Is there equivalent functions / helpers for those in Ruby / Rails ?

Answer 1

In Rails templates you can do

<%= debug an_object %> 

and it will do nice HTML PRE output.

Answer 2

Try using pp. You will need to require it in scripts (or in irb if your .irbc doesn't already do this):

require 'pp' 

Then you can 'PrettyPrint' an object thus:

pp object