Ruby gsub doesn't insert newlines

Question

I have a bunch of strings, and I'm trying to replace the spaces between them with newlines, using gsub:

<%= "string string string".gsub(" ","\n")  %>

But for some reason, it just prints as:

string string string

What am I doing wrong?

NOTE: It prints as expected in IRB terminal. I'm only experiencing this problem in my browser, printing with ERB.

Answer 1

This works fine for me:

    puts "string string string".gsub(" ","\n")

Maybe you have a situation similar to this:

    x = "string string string"
    y = x.gsub(" ","\n")
    puts x

In line 2 the spaces are replaced but x is not modified . The result y has replaced spaces.

To replace the values directly in x you must use gsub! .

---

Based on your edit:

\\n is not interpreted inside HTML, there you need a <br> . The br-tag may not be masked so in the end you can try something like this inside ERB:

    x.gsub(" ","<br/>\n").html_safe