Where did the 3 come from? I can't wrap my head around that one.

I managed the kata with an oldskool (not really best practise like) code, but I'm still puzzled about the "3". Anyway, thanks for the assistance! Appreciated!

The problem is in your code, it is printing and returning, it prints "***" and returns 3 it should only return "***"

In repl.it you see this: ***3

not sure how this solves the issue.

when I run "Test.assert_equals(repeat_str(3, ""),"**")" through my solution, the test gives me the following report:

"Expected: "***", instead got: 3"

but when I run the same test through ruby in (for example) replit, I do get the expected output. I still think there is an error somewhere.

Read https://docs.codewars.com/training/troubleshooting#expected-the-same