ARGV in Ruby is an array of arrays?

[talonx]

I was under the impression that each element of the ARGV arrays contains a value (non iterable). However, when I run this

def test(args)
    args.each do |arg|
        puts arg.respond_to?("each")
        arg.each do |a|
            puts a
        end
    end
 
if __FILE__ == $0
    test(ARGV)
end
 

and run it with ruby test.rb 1 2 3
I can see that each element is again an array, with one element each.

Is this expected?

[improvcornartist]

Each element is actually a string, but strings also have a method 'each' so your result is expected. Documentation is here.

So in your example, ARGV is an array of 3 string elements. Each arg then would be a string. When you do arg.each, it looks at each word within the string.

[talonx]

@improvcornartist: Thanks a lot!
It's interesting that String.each actually splits it, by default on \n.