Replacing the to_s method in Ruby. Not printing out desired string

Question

So, I am just beginning to learn Ruby and I included a to_s method in my Class so that I can simply pass the Object to a puts method and have it return more than just the Ob

Answer 1

When given arguments that are not strings or arrays puts calls rb_obj_as_string to turn its arguments into strings (see rb_io_puts)

If you search for rb_obj_as_string through the ruby codebase (I find http://rxr.whitequark.org useful for this) you can see it's defined as

VALUE rb_obj_as_string(VALUE obj)
{
  VALUE str;

  if (RB_TYPE_P(obj, T_STRING)) {
    return obj;
  }
  str = rb_funcall(obj, id_to_s, 0);
  if (!RB_TYPE_P(str, T_STRING))
    return rb_any_to_s(obj);
  if (OBJ_TAINTED(obj)) OBJ_TAINT(str);
  return str;
}

In brief this:

• returns straightaway if the argument is already a string
• calls to_s
• if the result is not a string, call rb_any_to_s and return that.

rb_any_to_s is what implements the default "class name and id" result that you're seeing: for any object it returns a string of the form #

Returning to your code, when you run puts player1 it calls rb_obj_as_string to convert your player to a string.

This first calls your to_s method, which uses puts to output your message. Your method then returns nil (because that's what puts always returns) so ruby calls rb_any_to_s, and that is what the outermost puts ends up using.