From: Fabian Streitel <karottenreibe@...>
Date: 2009-09-23T01:46:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Getting to one attribute of my marshalled array of objects

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>
> > Your to_s method would end up returning an array of Car objects and it
>
> might
> > have been pure accident that it looked ok in your command loop.
>
> Hmmm...ok, I am confused on this one.  I thought the whole point of
> .each was to iterate through the elements of arrays and hashes and
> perform actions on each one...like a for or while loop without the fuss
> and muss of counters, etc.
>

That is correct. But unlike a C-style for or while loop, a call to #each()
does
have a return value. And again unlike C, a function always returns its last
value, e.g:

    def foo
        5
    end
    foo()  # returns 5

And since #each() returns an array and the call to #each() was the
last thing in the #to_s() method, #to_s() would just return what
#each() returned -- an array.

What you wanted was probably #inject(). It's a very powerful method
that let's you do all kinds of neat things. See [1] and [2]

Greetz!

[1]: http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Enumerable.html#M003140
[2]: http://blog.jayfields.com/2008/03/ruby-inject.html

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