Is overriding to_s methods in Ruby bad? [closed]

No, you should feel free to override to_s - there are no ill side-effects. As long as your new to_s is more informative than the built-in (not exactly a high standard there), you're in the clear.

And they help make your test failures read better - sometimes by a lot - which is never a bad thing. Go for it!

I override to_s all the time in my Rails project:

   def to_s
     first_name + " " + last_name
   end

so that it's easier to show objects in the view:

<%= @person %>

It might be tricky to do that because sometimes, inspect method just calls to_s, and if that is altered, you might have trouble debugging. If you think altering to_s may confuse you when you need to see the results by methods that rely on inspect , such as p, then maybe you need to redefine inspect for that class at the same time. As long as you are sure what you are doing, you might want to do it.