I was going through my google analytics logs today and I noticed that a lot of folks were coming to my site on Google searches for stuff like ‘print_r + ruby on rails‘.
So I figured I’d write a blog post about it, because I’ve had the same problem.
What you’re looking for is ‘inspect’.
If you have an array, hash or object that you want to take a quick-and-dirty look at just type in
objectname.inspect
eg:
posts.inspect
or if you’re in rails just do …
render :text => posts.inspect and return false
and you’ll get an output of the contents of said array, hash or object.
Here is a screen capture of a quick irb session to show you how it works.
I hope this helps.