What does send() do in Ruby?

Question

Can someone please tell me what

send(\"#{Model.find...}\")

is and does?

Answer 1

What does send do?

send is another way of calling a method.

This is best illustrated by example:

o = Object.new
o.send(:to_s) # => "#"
# is equivalent to:
o.to_s # => "#"

Send lives in the Object class.

What is the benefit of ths?

The benefit of this approach is that you can pass in the method you want to call as a parameter. Here is a simple example:

def dynamically_call_a_method(name)
    o = Object.new
    o.send name 
end
dynamically_call_a_method(:to_s) # => "#"

You can pass in the method you want to be called. In this case we passed in :to_s. This can be very handy when doing ruby metaprogramming, because this allows us to call different methods according to our different requirements.