each_element not behaving as expected

When I'm in irb and I do something like this:

node_list.each_element { |e| puts e.text }

It works and prints one line of text per element returned (plus I think it returns the xml object). However, when I head over to rails and have things moving between controllers, helpers, views and layouts it just dumps the xml object.

I should mention that for good reasons I'm using rails 1.2.3 and ruby 1.8.7.

Gratzi!

Solution

So the issue your having is that puts writes to console and not the template. Also, in ruby the a method will return by default its last object. So your method as written will loop through @child1, print each's text to the console, and then return the @child1 object at which point your erb tags of <%= %> tells it print the object (@child1 in this case)

You have two options, either you can move it out into the template:

<% tol_get_names(@child1) do |e| %> #note just <% and not <%=
  <%= e.text %>
<% end %>

Or build your method so that it loops through building a string and then returns that string instead of the original object:

def tol_get_names(child)
  texts = [] #empty array for all our values
  child.each_element { |e| 
    texts << e.text #add the text string to our array
  end
  texts.join(", ") #build a string and seperate it with a comma
end

Several ways you could write this type of method, but this is my usual way.