Implicit return values in Ruby

Question

I am somewhat new to Ruby and although I find it to be a very intuitive language I am having some difficulty understanding how implicit return values behave.

I am w

Answer 1

In ruby the return value of a method is the value returned by the last statement. You can opt to have an explicit return too.

In your example, the first snippet returns the string output. The second snippet however returns the value returned by the each method (which is now the last stmt), which turns out to be an array of matches.

irb(main):014:0> "StackOverflow Meta".scan(/[aeiou]\w/).each do |match|
irb(main):015:1* s << match
irb(main):016:1> end
=> ["ac", "er", "ow", "et"]

Update: However that still doesn't explain your output on a single line. I think it's a formatting error, it should print each of the matches on a different line because that's how puts prints an array. A little code can explain it better than me..

irb(main):003:0> one_to_three = (1..3).to_a
=> [1, 2, 3]
irb(main):004:0> puts one_to_three
1
2
3
=> nil

Personally I find your method with the explicit return more readable (in this case)