A very early Ruby problem

Ruby
1

In Chris P.'s book, “Learn to Program”, he asks you to write a small
app. I’m having trouble writing this app and I was wondering if anyone
could help me out.

Here’s the excerpt:

“I guess we could write a program which asks for your first, middle,
and last names individually, and then adds those lengths together…
hey, why don’t you do that! Go ahead, I’ll wait.”
http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/?Chapter=05

I’m having a problem writing this code. I know a lot of you will look
at this and think this is the easiest thing ever. I hope I catch
someone like that to help me out.

Any ideas?

thanks a lot.

2

On 5/23/07, Jonndailey [email protected] wrote:

I’m having a problem writing this code. I know a lot of you will look
at this and think this is the easiest thing ever. I hope I catch
someone like that to help me out.

Any ideas?

thanks a lot.

Hi,

Did you understand the program just before that?
The one that asked for your full name and printed the number of
characters.

Would you show how much you have been able to write so far?

Harry

–

A Look into Japanese Ruby List in English
http://www.kakueki.com/

3

Well this is rather simple. You know how to read from STDIN (= console
input)? There are several ways like gets or readline. So

surname = readline or surename = gets reads from the console and saves
the string in the variable surname. You can get the length of a string
with the length method. So surename.length gives the length of surename
but realize that gets and readline also are saving the newline feed in
the variable you have to cut off with chomp or length will always be 1
to high.

A simple implementation looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

$VERBOSE = true

outputs surname on the screen

puts “surname:”

reads console input to surname

surname = gets

puts “middlename:”
middlename = gets

puts “lastname:”
lastname = gets

puts “total length:”

adds the lengths of the three strings after they have beeen chomped

p surname.chomp.length+middlename.chomp.length+lastname.chomp.length

Jonndailey wrote:

I’m having a problem writing this code. I know a lot of you will look
at this and think this is the easiest thing ever. I hope I catch
someone like that to help me out.

Any ideas?

thanks a lot.

–
greets

                 one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to

give birth to a dancing star

4

Thanks a lot. I was going about it the wrong way. It looks so simple
now. Thank you!

5

Thanks a lot. I was going about it the wrong way. It looks so simple
now. Thank you!

6

On May 23, 2007, at 2:10 AM, Jonndailey wrote:

In Chris P.'s book, “Learn to Program”, he asks you to write a small
app. I’m having trouble writing this app and I was wondering if anyone
could help me out.

An excellent book. It’s where I learned to program Ruby!

So you’d first want to ask for them. Remember, variables are stored
from right to left.

#use gets.chomp to ask for the name. Store the result in the
appropriate variable.
first_name = gets.chomp
middle_name = gets.chomp
last_name = gets.chomp

#Now we need to add these parts together.

And you’re fabulous puts code goes here.

You probably had trouble with how to ask for it, right? I know that’s
where I had trouble. puts ing the phrase is just as easy - just puts
each variable, and separate each with a space.

The blind teaching the blind
HTH
---------------------------------------------------------------|
~Ari
“I don’t suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it” --1337est
man alive