Escape the square brackets and quotation marks or fetch this array without the quotes and brackets

Question

I have a class my_class.rb which has a public method get_names

class MyClass < ActiveRecord::Base

  ##.....##

  def get_names
     self.students.collect {|x| x.name}
  end
end

on the view I am calling the method to fill a form input field like this:

<%= simple_form_for @movie do |f| %> 
   ...

    <%= f.input :get_names %> 
<% end %>

the values that fill the input field looks like this:

["William", "Alexis", "John", "Richard"]

but i would like them to look like this:

 William, Alexis, John, Richard

What changes can i make to get_names method or how can i escape the brackets and quotation marks?

Answer 1

You can use the join method on your array :

["William", "Alexis", "John", "Richard"].join(", ")

So here you can just do :

self.students.collect {|x| x.name}.join(", ")

but your method will then return a string and not an array.