Question

I’m sure this is a stupid question, but I’ve got a todo list app I’ve built in Rails. There are projects and projects have many tasks. Aside from seeing projects with their tasks, I also wanted to see a simple listing of all of the tasks. The index action in the tasks controller looks like this:

def index
    @tasks = Task.all
    respond_to do |format|
      format.html # index.html.erb
      format.xml  { render :xml => @tasks }
    end
end

And in views/tasks/index.html.erb I simply had this to start:

  <%= @tasks.each do |t| %>
    <%= t.title %>,
  <% end %>

But when I look at /tasks, I get this:

Task 1, Task 2, Task 3
#<Task:0x103225138>#<Task:0x1031ea998>#<Task:0x1031ea858>

I can’t figure out why the

#<Task:0x103225138>#<Task:0x1031ea998>#<Task:0x1031ea858>"

…are appearing or how to keep them from appearing. They appear even if I’m not printing anything other than the loop code. Any ideas? Thanks!

Answer 1

<% @tasks.each do |t| %>
  <%= t.title %>,
<% end %>

Will fix that. The problem is that you are printing with = the result of .each which returns the array it was called on, in this case @tasks. So your code is effectively doing this:

<% @tasks.each do |t| %>
  <%= t.title %>,
<% end %>
<%= @tasks %>

A side note:

A much nicer way to do this is simply

<%= @tasks.map(&:title).join ", " %>