CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby
etieteeyen
etieteeyen

Reputation: 65

How to create line break in ruby return statement

My code is this:

require 'date'

class Account
  attr_reader :date, :balance

  def initialize
    @balance = 0
    @date = DateTime.now.strftime "%d/%m/%Y"
    @transaction = ["date  ||  credit  ||  debit  ||  balance", "#{@date} ||  #{@credit}  ||  #{@debit}  ||  #{@balance}"]
  end

  def statement
    return @transaction.join("\n")
  end
end

I want to call account = Account.new and then account.statement to produce a line break between the two statements in the @transaction array.

The code prints "\n" as is instead of converting to a line break. It works if I use puts instead of return, but I need to use return in order for my RSpec tests to work.

Any help would be appreciated.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2828

Answers (1)

Tom Lord
Tom Lord

Reputation: 28305

When you run code in the console (e.g. irb or pry), you see the inspected response of each line/method that gets executed.

For example, try the following:

> puts "hello\nworld"
hello
world

> "hello\nworld"
  => "hello\nworld"

> puts "hello\nworld".inspect
"hello\nworld"

This behaviour is an intentional, valuable feature of the console. It allows you to easy distinguish between different types of whitespace (tabs, spaces, newlines, carriage returns, ...); it allows you to distinguish between variable types (strings vs integers etc); it allows you to see non-printed characters, such as non-breaking space; and so on.

Your code above works fine. The \n is a new line character.

The only "issue" is that you are seeing it displayed in its escaped form (\n) in the console.

If you print the response in the console, you will see the newline displayed in its normal way:

> account = Account.new
> puts account.statement

Upvotes: 2

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