From: SonOfLilit <sonoflilit@...>
Date: 2007-02-20T03:53:52+09:00
Subject: Re: Pine's tutorial "Word Sorter" exercise

#sort and #sort_by accept blocks that tell how to do the comparison, so:

puts input.sort_by{|a| a.downcase}

is the simplest solution.

PLUG: The RubyMentor project is looking for newbies to help!
http://rubymentor.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl

On 2/19/07, Randy Shipp <randyshipp@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Apr 1 2006, 8:12 pm, Jan_K <n...@none.com> wrote:
> > Solution for the 1st exercise in chapter 8:
> >
> > (I'm skipping the 2nd exercise - just a bunch of busywork)
> >
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > input = []
> >
> > while input.last != ''
> >   input.push gets.chomp
> > end
> >
> > puts input.sort
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> ----------
> To reset slightly, this is an exercise that tells you to accept words
> from the user until they just hit Enter, then alphabetize the list.
>
> My problem with the exercise is that the sort method alphabetizes
> capital letters before lowercase letters.  Therefore, if input ==
> [ant, bear, Zebra], the output of
>
> puts input.sort
>
> is
>
> Zebra
> ant
> bear
>
> ...which is clearly not what most users will expect.  Short of
> changing the line in the program to read
>
>   input.push gets.chomp.downcase
>
> (thus altering the entered words in a possibly undesirable way), how
> can we get the sort to work the way we might expect?  Thanks in
> advance.
>
> Randy...
>
>
>