Question

I am relatively new to the rails syntax. I have a LogString class

class LogString < Array

I do the following with it

logs = LogString.new
logs.push 'this happened'
logs.push 'that happened'

which works fine. i want to be able to just write only

logs

to return what would be logs.join( ‘ | ‘ )

so i am looking for a syntax something like the method log_string here

class LogString < Array
   def log_string
      self.join( ' | ' )
   end
end

but where log_string is automatically called when i simply write the class instance name: logs

how can i do that?

Answer 1

You can’t just reference an object and have it call a method on the object, but you can get pretty close.

If you override the to_s method (short for “to string”), you’ll be able to do something like…

class LogString < Array
  def to_s
     self.join ' | '
  end
end

log = LogString.new
log << "message one"
log << "message two"

puts "#{log}"