Repeated, but unformatted, table data

Rails
1

Hello,
When printing the data from a database table to an html table in
index.html.erb, there is a strange output in which the entire table is
printed sequentially and unformatted, followed by the actual formatted
data. The formatted data is correct, along with its headers and some
links.
After the html headers are printed in a table row:

... then the table data is printed:

<%= @people.each do |person| %>

... and by the process of elimination, the offending line is <%= @people.each do |person| %> as the table data dump occurs even when it is alone (except for the following <% end %>). But, of course, I can't do without it or I wouldn't get all of the table data. How do I fix that line, or what is the replacement which still iterates through the table? Thanks, Barney
First name
<%= person.first_name %> <%= person.middle_name %>
2

On Jul 25, 2011, at 7:03 PM, Barney wrote:

First name ... then the table data is printed:

<%= @people.each do |person| %>

<%= person.first_name %> <%= person.middle_name %> ... and by the process of elimination, the offending line is <%= @people.each do |person| %> as the table data dump occurs even when it

That should be <% @people.each do |person| %>

Or even better, <%- @people.each do |person| -%> which will not add an
empty line to your output HTML.

Walter

3

Thanks Walter! That did the trick!
Do you have a link where I can read about the differences between <
%= … , <%-… and <% ? I haven’t spotted that in the “Agile Web
Development with Rails” book I’m reading.
Barney

4

On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 5:24 PM, Barney [email protected] wrote:

Do you have a link where I can read about the differences between <
%= … , <%-… and <% ? I haven’t spotted that in the “Agile Web
Development with Rails” book I’m reading.

Look in the index for “ERb” – my old second edition covers this on
page 40-43.

HTH,

Hassan S. ------------------------ [email protected]

twitter: @hassan

5

Ah, yes, on p. 21 it says that <%= will execute the Ruby, HTML-escape
it, convert it to a string and print it to the screen. Unfortunately,
just because I read something doesn’t mean I remember it! Thanks to
Walter and Hassan for reminding me!
Barney

6

It’s pretty basic:

<%= foo %> means print whatever is inside to the output. In Rails 2.3,
it means literally print it whatever it is. In Rails 3 and up, it
means html-escape it and print it.

<% foo %> means this is an instruction line, a bit of Ruby mixed in
among the HTML. You use this to start and end your loops over a
collection, or put an island of logic or data in the view. If you put
a puts command in there, then it’s functionally the same thing as the
first one, but if you don’t explicitly print anything, it’s just a
program step.

<%- foo -%> means this is an instruction line, but in addition, don’t
leave an extra line of whitespace where it was, just do the Ruby
instruction and don’t add any whitespace.

Walter