Re: writing a poem backwards or in reverse order

On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 8:08 PM, teresa nuagen
<[e-mail]> wrote:
> alright thanks for your advice and tips. I'm familiarizing myself with
> string and the order of words. Is array applied in this problem or i'm I
> only focusing on string?

String#split returns an array of strings, so yes, you need to
understand arrays a bit.
An array is a container of objects, in which each element can be
accessed by index:

array = [1,2,3,4]
array[0] --> 1
array[1] --> 2
etc.

You can traverse an array using the code I showed above.

> Can I have the poem in ruby and then change the order using separate
> programs or do I have to open the file through nano first and then in
> ruby? If so how do I open a nano file using ruby? My current file is
> "nano poem" to open it in ruby do I have to change it into a ".txt"
> file. How would I do that?

I guess your idea is to have a text file containing the original poem,
and then using Ruby to reverse the order. You can create your file
using any text editor such as nano, vi, gedit or whatever (notepad on
Windows, for example). Save it with a name that you like, for example
poem, it doesn't need to end in .txt. Then you can read the contents
of the file using File.read, which returns a string with the contents
of the file. You can then split on "\n" (the end of line character)
and you get back an array of lines. Try this in irb:

contents = File.read("poem")
puts contents
lines = contents.split("\n")
p lines

and work from there.

Jesus.