From: "Jesús Gabriel y Galán" <jgabrielygalan@...>
Date: 2011-03-18T02:24:08+09:00
Subject: Re: What is p's real behavior?

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 6:02 PM, Yu-Hsuan Lai <raincolee@gmail.com> wrote:
> I read the RDoc and it says:
> For each object, directly writes *obj*.inspect followed by the current
> output record separator to the program‘s standard output.
>
> But my $\ is surely nil, it still append a newline after output.
> ("output record separator" is $\, right?)
> Why does it do this?

Looking into Ruby 1.8.7's source code I see this in io.c:

void
rb_p(obj)                       /* for debug print within C code */
    VALUE obj;
{
    rb_io_write(rb_stdout, rb_obj_as_string(rb_inspect(obj)));
    rb_io_write(rb_stdout, rb_default_rs);
}

This is the function called by the function defined as 'p'. As you can
see it's outputting the rb_default_rs. Searching for this in the
source, it's only assigned to here, in io.c:

rb_rs = rb_default_rs = rb_str_new2("\n");

So it seems it's assigned to "\n". I don't know if this rb_default_rs
is assigned to something else somewhere else (a grep -r rb_default_rs
* only shows the assignment I showed above), maybe someone with more
knowledge can chime in. If this is not the case, then I guess the
documentation should say "the default record separator". Anyone?

Jesus.