Writing To The Response in Rails? (Like "echo" in PHP)

Question

I know that I can do this in Rails:

<%="hello" %>

but is there any way to do this

<%
echo "hello"
%>

and get it to show up in the response? I have tried response.write which almost worked, but did not...

Edit: print or puts do not do it, because I do not want to write to the console. I want to write to the browser/HTTP client.

Edit: Here is an example:

<%
unless @research_activities.size == 0
   concat(render(:partial => 'list'))
end
%>

Why would I want to include two closing tags just to do that? It reads nicely in code, doesn't it?

Answer 1

How about print "hello" or printf("hello")

Answer 2

You're looking for "print" or "puts", depending on whether or not you want a newline (probably not). Almost every object implements .to_s, which works also, though my feeling is that there's probably a better way to do whatever you're trying to do. Any more context on this?

Answer 3

Have you tried concat.

I have seen this when wandering in Rails documentation. Not sure at all since I am very new to Rails.

Answer 4

What you have to write is

<% concat "bank", binding %>

now you can do something like

<%
  10.times do
    concat "cat", binding
  end
%>

for ten cat

Answer 5

Just curious, why would you want to write directly to the response object?