Question

I’m new to Ruby and am currently working on some practice code which looks like the following:

puts 'Hello there, Can you tell me your favourite number?'
num = gets.chomp
puts 'Your favourite number is ' + num + '?'
puts 'Well its not bad but  ' + num * 10 + ' is literally 10 times better!'

This code however just puts ten copies of the num variable and doesn’t actually multiply the number so I assume I need to make the ‘num’ variable an integer? I’ve had no success with this so can anyone show me where I’m going wrong please?

Answer 1

If you are using to_i, then chomp before that is redundant. So you can do:

puts 'Hello there, Can you tell me your favourite number?'
num = gets.to_i
puts 'Your favourite number is ' + num.to_s + '?'
puts 'Well its not bad but  ' + (num * 10).to_s + ' is literally 10 times better!'

But generally, using "#{}" is better since you do not have to care about to_s, and it runs faster, and is easier to see. The method String#+ is particularly very slow.

puts 'Hello there, Can you tell me your favourite number?'
num = gets.to_i
puts "Your favourite number is #{num}?"
puts "Well its not bad but  #{num * 10} is literally 10 times better!"