From: anansi <kazaam@...>
Date: 2007-05-23T17:15:06+09:00
Subject: Re: A very early Ruby problem..

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:
> In Chris Pine'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.
> 
> 


-- 
greets

                     one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to 
give birth to a dancing star