The Three Ways to Print in Ruby

In Ruby, there are three main ways to print the result of an operation or expression to the console. This is very similar to console.log() in JavaScript:

1. puts
2. print
3. p

All three of these commands to roughly the same thing, however there are some subtle differences between them.

puts: this prints the result without any type formatting (number vs. string for instance) and each puts statement automatically inserts a new line between them. If you like a nice orderly format for printing outputs, the puts command is it!

print: this is your bare-bones option. The print command will print the raw output to the screen with zero formatting. The user will need to insert their own new lines or other formatting options using escape characters ( \n for a new line, \t for tabulation)

p: this is somewhere in the middle and can be very useful. The p command will print each new output on a new line, but it will also print the output in the style of it's type. If you print 42 as a string, the output will be "42" and if you print 42 as a number, it will print out as 42.

Personally, I will use all three and sometimes will switch them out as needed. I usually use print or p when printing out arrays, since the puts command will print each index of an array on a different line, which takes up a lot of space.