Question

I am extracting a series of strings from an XML stream and storing them in a mySQL Database (tried with VARCHAR and TEXT). At the start of each array, in the DB, I get --- and then either a [] if it is a blank array or the values.

Rake task code:

@issue = Array.new  
items.each do |item| #items is the parsed elements from XML
    link_key = item.xpath('key').inner_text
    @issue << link_key
    Rails.logger.debug("Issue: #{@issue.inspect}")
  end

Database value example:

“— []”

-or-

“—
– CR-3528”

Not sure what else would be useful.

Answer 1

That’s because you’re serializing an array.

One way to deal with this is to mark a field as serialized with serialize (docs):

serialize :issue

See this for additional details.

If you had been storing the value as text, you should not have seen this–it would have been just the text.