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Ruby Loops

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Part 1: Asking Questions

3:10 with Jason Seifer

Now that we're familiar with loops and iteration, let's practice our knowledge by writing a simple contact list program.

Code Samples

Here is the code we write in this portion of the video.

First, we set up a contact list array:

contact_list = []

Next, we define the ask method. We're going to be asking the user for input quite a bit so the ask method will repeat the logic for us.

def ask(question, kind="string")
  print question + " "
  answer = gets.chomp
  answer = answer.to_i if kind == "number"
  return answer
end

The ask method takes two arguments and defaults to having the kind of answer be a string. This will let us return numeric values if we want.

Finally, we test the ask method:

answer = ask("What is your name?")
puts answer

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    [SOUND] Now 0:00
    that we're familiar with Loops and Iteration, let's practice 0:04
    our knowledge by writing a simple contact list program using Workspaces. 0:08
    Now we're gonna write a simple contact list program, and 0:13
    this is what it looks like. 0:17
    It will ask what the person's name is, and then do we want to add a phone number? 0:18
    And then, we'll enter a couple phone numbers. 0:31
    We don't want to add another person, and it will print out the contact list. 0:34
    So let's go ahead and get started. 0:40
    Let's go ahead and create a new file and we'll call it contact_list.rb. 0:44
    So first we will have our contact list be an array and let's set that up, up front. 0:55
    We now have an empty array. 1:04
    Now one thing that we're going to be doing a lot is asking the user a question. 1:07
    Let's go ahead and create a method called ask, since we're going to be asking 1:11
    questions so often, and we'll call this method ask. 1:15
    Now let's go ahead and send in a couple arguments. 1:25
    So we're going to ask a question, and we'll say that the kind 1:30
    of question we're asking by default is going to be a string. 1:37
    That's going to be what we want to get back from the user. 1:42
    So let's go ahead and print the question plus a space, 1:45
    which will give somebody time to respond. 1:51
    Now, we will get the answer from standard input, remove any trailing white space, 1:56
    and then we'll say the answer is going to be an integer 2:05
    if the kind is a number. 2:11
    And then we will return the answer. 2:18
    Now let's just run this, and we'll just say answer equals ask, what is your name. 2:23
    And since we gave it a kind of string, we don't need to enter that, 2:34
    since it has what's called a default value of an argument. 2:40
    And then let's just print out the answer and see what happens. 2:46
    Okay, so we now know that we are getting back a variable from the ask method. 2:52
    In our next video, we're going to go ahead and create the add contact method, 3:01
    which is going to use the ask method which we just wrote. 3:07

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