How to return JSON in ruby?

Question

In the rails console if I type:

User.all.to_json

I get the following returned.

"[{\"created_at\":\"2013-04-29T23:10:36Z\",\"email\":\"test@test.com\",\"id\":2,\"updated_at\":\"2013-04-29T23:10:36Z\"},{\"created_at\":\"2013-03-18T04:53:42Z\",\"email\":\"sharataka@gmail.com\",\"id\":1,\"updated_at\":\"2013-05-01T12:03:01Z\"}]"

When copy/paste this to http://jsonviewer.stack.hu/ and try to view it as JSON, I get an error saying 'Invalid JSON Variable'. I believe this is because of the '\\' characters. Any advice on how to fix this?

Answer 1

• to_json returns a JSON string with escaped quotes etc.
• as_json returns it as actual JSON, this is what would validate properly.

Which you use depends on how you're rendering it.

Answer 2

If you do that in your console, it's "normal" that the output contains several quotes and backslashes.

In my irb console:

irb(main):009:0> Patient.first.to_json
#=> "{\"patient\":{\"created_at\":\"2013-03-14T16:53:52-04:00\",\"id\":6538,\"updated_at\":\"2013-03-14T16:53:52-04:00\"}}"

But using the method puts :

irb(main):010:0> puts Patient.first.to_json
{"patient":{"created_at":"2013-03-14T16:53:52-04:00","id":6538,"updated_at":"2013-03-14T16:53:52-04:00"}}
#=> nil