From: "Thomas B." <sinixlol@...>
Date: 2011-09-24T11:53:37+09:00
Subject: Conditional statements with multiple arguments

Good afternoon everyone,

I'm a beginner in Ruby with a little bit of experience programming in
Java and PHP. Right now I'm having a difficult time grasping conditional
(if/elsif) statements in Ruby. I'm trying to get an if statement to
evaluate two different strings...i.e.

action = gets.chomp()

if action == "M" || "m"
  menu()
else
  puts "Please enter in a valid selection."
end

So, from what I'm used to in programming, the if action == "M" || "m""
should evaluate to a conditional statement as to whether or not action
is equal to the strings "M" or "m". However, this does not seem to be
the case. It's not giving any kind of an error, however, it is calling
the menu() method regardless of what is entered. I can easily make this
work by separating the "M" and the "m" into an if and an elsif argument
i.e:

action = gets.chomp()

if action == "M"
  menu()

elsif action == "m"
  menu()

else
  puts "Please enter in a valid selection."
end

The above process does seem to work, however, isn't there a simpler way
of accomplishing this so I'm not adding unnecessary conditional
statements? I've been trying to find more resources online about
conditional statements with multiple arguments, but none of them have
seemed to help out. I'm guessing that my understanding of the || and
"or" statements is misguided.

Any help would be really appreciated on this issue. Thanks!

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