Why does Array.to_s return brackets?

Question

For an array, when I type:

puts array[0]

==> text 

Yet when I type

puts array[0].to_s

==> ["text"]

Why the brackets and quotes? What am I missing?

ADDENDUM: my code looks like this

page = open(url)  {|f| f.read }
page_array = page.scan(/regex/) #pulls partial urls into an array
partial_url = page_array[0].to_s
full_url = base_url + partial_url #adds each partial url to a consistent base_url
puts full_url

what I'm getting looks like:

http://www.stackoverflow/["questions"]

Answer 1

This print the array as is without brackets

array.join(", ")

Answer 2

to_s is just an alias to inspect for the Array class.

Not that this means a lot other than instead of expecting array.to_s to return a string it's actually returning array.inspect which, based on the name of the method, isn't really what you are looking for.

If you want just the "guts" try:

page_array.join

If there are multiple elements to the array:

page_array.join(" ")

This will make:

page_array = ["test","this","function"]

return:

"test this function"

What "to_s" on an Array returns, depends on the version of Ruby you are using as mentioned above. 1.9.X returns:

"[\"test\"]"

Answer 3

You need to show us the regex to really fix this properly, but this will do it:

Replace this

partial_url = page_array[0].to_s

with this

partial_url = page_array[0][0]