From: "Peña, Botp" <botp@...>
Date: 2007-07-19T11:30:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Newbie looking for help: Determining Gender

From: Matthew Borgeson [mailto:hibridmatthias@sbcglobal.net] 
# I have tried while loops but cant get it to work as well as 
# making it into a method. Is there a different way to do this 
# that my lack of experience is preventingme from seeing/ Is 
# iteration over a an array something worth following? I 
# apologize for such a basic question, but the PickAxe,the book 
# by Chris Pine, and multiple web sites are failing me and I am 
# turnig here as a last resort...

the pickaxe and pine's book are good enough. one only needs practice, think like exercise or kata :)

if a lot if/else boggles your mind (maybe because of deciding when to loop back and what to print), you might want to delegate the sex choice to a list checker, say like "check entry from a list. do foo if not found otherwise do blah..."; thus letting ruby do the search logic for us and we only take care of the loop problem ...

eg,

botp@pc4all:~$ cat test.rb
#------------------------------------
sexCheckH = Hash.new
sexCheckH = {  "m" => "male",
               "f" => "female"
            }

doseSexS = nil
until doseSexS do
   puts 'What gender is your patient? Please enter m or f'
   doseSexS = sexCheckH[ptSexS = gets.chomp.downcase]
   puts "Invalid entry [#{ptSexS}]. Pls retry" unless doseSexS
end
puts "Your patient is a #{doseSexS}."
#------------------------------------

botp@pc4all:~$ ruby test.rb
What gender is your patient? Please enter m or f
x
Invalid entry [x]. Pls retry
What gender is your patient? Please enter m or f
m
Your patient is a male.
botp@pc4all:~$ ruby test.rb
What gender is your patient? Please enter m or f
y
Invalid entry [y]. Pls retry
What gender is your patient? Please enter m or f
f
Your patient is a female.
botp@pc4all:~$

kind regards -botp