I know there are several different ways of being able to combine puts statements into one. But more importantly, I'm trying to determine if there's a generally accepted/preferred style for this (I've only been able to dig up other people's clever ways of doing it, but no real reference on a preferred style).
I've seen things like this:
puts "This", "is", "fairly", "easy" # Each word goes on it's own line
or perhaps:
puts ["This", "seems", "convoluted"].join("\n") # Each word goes on it's own line
or an "ugly" way:
def ugly_puts
puts "Not using quotes
And using no code indentation to preserve output formatting"
end
or simply:
puts "This"
puts "Seems"
puts "Straightforward."
It makes most sense for me to use the last methodology, but I'm just curious if there's a common/preferred way I should go about dealing with multiple line output like this.
If the lines to be printed are short enough to be put together on a single line in the source, then I would go with your first option:
puts "This", "is", "fairly", "easy"
If they are long, then I would use a heredoc:
puts <<_.unindent
This Blah Blah ...
Seems Blah Blah ...
Straightforward. Blah Blah ...
_
where unindent is a method to unindent an indented heredoc along the lines suggested in Ruby indented multiline strings. Notice that in future versions of Ruby, it is likely that there will be a simpler way to unindent a heredoc, so this option will become more useful.
I see no point in using your second or fourth option. The third may be used, but it looks ugly.