Ruby: How to make IRB print structure for Arrays and Hashes

Question

When I make a new array/hash in irb, it prints out a nice format to show the structure, ex.

["value1", "value2", "value3"] {"key1" => "value1"} 

... but when I try to print out my variables using puts, I get them collapsed:

value1 value2 value3 key1 value1 

I gather that puts is not the right command for what I want, but what is? I want to be able to view my variables in irb in the first format, not the second.

Answer 1

You can either use the inspect method:

a=["value1", "value2", "value3"] puts a.inspect 

Or, even better, use the pp (pretty print) lib:

require 'pp' a=["value1", "value2", "value3"] pp a