Question

Just started working through the Ruby chapter in Mr. Tate’s “Seven Language in Seven Weeks”.

For the bonus question in Day 1, I am to generate a “random” number, read a user’s guess from the input, and compare the guess to my “random” number, then prompt the user to continue guessing with the begin loop. However, the loop seems to terminate regardless of what the value of the string the user inputs.

# file : day1_bonus.rb
# Seven Languages In Seven Weeks
#
# Guess a random number!

again = "y"

begin
  print "Enter a number between 0 and 9: "
  number = gets.to_i
  randNum = rand(10)

  if number == randNum
    puts 'You guessed correctly!'
  else
    puts 'You guessed incorrectly.'
  end

  print "Play again? (y/n): "
  again = gets
  again.chomp   # remove carriage return
end while again == "y"

Output:

Enter a number between 0 and 9: 3
You guessed incorrectly.
Play again? (y/n): y
nil

Answer 1

There are two versions of chomp. The regular chomp and bang chomp!. The difference being: regular returns modified string (and leaves source alone) while the bang version modifies original string in-place.

So, in your code you chomp the carriage return and throw away this work. Either do this

again = again.chomp

or this

again.chomp!