Ruby on rails: printing the variable name for debugging purposes in the console

Question

Lets say I have i variable var witch is a pointer to another variable named user_id.

How do I puts var such that I can see in the console user_id = (whatever the value is)

Reason why I want to do this, is because I want to write a method called print_debug_block, where you give it an array of variables, and it prints in the following format:

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||  
var1 = valOfVar1  
var2 = valOfVar2  
var3 = valOfVar3  
etc  
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

Answer 1

logger.debug() outputs to the log.

See http://guides.rubyonrails.org/debugging_rails_applications.html#the-logger