From: John Winters <john@...>
Date: 2008-08-01T05:31:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Needing help with which to_s gets called

Sebastian Hungerecker wrote:
> John Winters wrote:
>> Why when Able is a sub-class of Array does my to_s method get ignored?
> 
> Because puts special cases arrays, not calling to_s on them at all.
> If you compare  puts [1,2,3]  to  puts [1,2,3].to_s  you will see
> that this is the case (puts [1,2,3] is just like puts 1,2,3 printing
> each number on its own line instead of having it all in one line like
> you get with to_s.

Thanks for that.  There certainly seems to be some sort of 
special-casing going on, but it's more widespread than just puts.

I tried the test case which you suggested and see exactly what you said. 
However I also went back to my original code and changed the "puts" line 
from:

puts item

to:

output = item.to_s
puts output

and I still get the same oddity so it's clearly not just puts doing it.

Do you have a reference where I can read up more on this?

TIA,
John
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