This card is very old. Modern Rails no longer supports render :text.
When your Rails controller action responds with only a simple text, render text: 'Hello' may not be what you want. You should not even use it on Rails 4.1+ any more.
By default, a "text" response from a Rails controller will still be a sent as text/html:
render text: 'Hello'
response.body # => "Hello"
response.content_type # => "text/html"
While this may not be too relevant for a Browser client, the response's content type is simply wrong if you want to send a plain-text response, and can cause trouble. \
For example, consider a middleware that
transforms HTML responses
Show archive.org snapshot
; it would also touch such wannabe-plain-text responses sent with the incorrect content type.
To avoid that, simply set your content type properly:
render text: 'Hello', content_type: 'text/plain'
response.body # => "Hello"
response.content_type # => "text/plain"
Latest Rails
Rails 4.1 deprecates render :text. You should use render :html or render :plain instead.
render html: 'Hello'
response.body # => "Hello"
response.content_type # => "text/html"
render plain: 'Hello'
response.body # => "Hello"
response.content_type # => "text/plain"
There is also render :body which does not set a content type, so it is probably not really what you want in such cases.
