Some special rules apply when strings are rendered. By default when any render method or tag block returns a string the string is wrapped in a span tag.

For example

def render
  "my fat string"
end

Will generate <span>My fat string</span> and

def render
  div { "in a div" }
end

will generate <div><span>in a div</span></div>

However this only works for the string actually returned.

Say you have

def render
  div do
    "text 1"
    "text 2"
    "text 3"
  end
end

You will only get <div>text 3</div>

Instead you probably want to do this:

def render
  div do
    span {"text 1"}
    span {"text 2"}
    span {"text 3"} # this span is not necessary but it makes things neater
  end
end

To make things a bit shorter you can send attach the following tags directly to a string span, para (the p tag), td, th and br. For example

table do
  tr do
    "column 1".td
    "column 2".td
    "column 3".td
  end
end

Note that you can pass parameters to the methods and attach classes as normal. For example

"foo".span(style: {font_size: "20px"}).my_class

renders

<span class="my-class" style="font-size: '20px'">foo</span>