From: Peter Vandenabeele <peter@...>
Date: 2012-01-15T00:42:15+09:00
Subject: Re: A very very beginner question.

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On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 4:14 PM, Brandon K. <brandon0981@gmail.com> wrote:

> First off I apologize for the 'noobishness' of this question. I'm on a
> quest to teach myself programming and I started off with Ruby.


Welcome to Ruby :-)


> Now I'm
> following online lessons and it's going pretty well but I'm stuck on
> program they suggested to make and I don't want to move forward until I
> know how to do it.
>
> They want me to write a program that asks for someone's favorite number
> then add 1 to the number and say that the program thinks that number is
> just a little bit bigger and better. This is what I have:
>
> p 'Hey you! What\'s your favorite number?'
> fav = gets.chomp
> fav2 = fav.to_i + 1
> p '...well that\'s an OK number but don\'t you think ' + fav2 + ' is a
> little bit bigger and better?'
>
> (I have puts abbreviated to p)
>
> So far from what I've learned I'm stuck, what am I getting wrong here?
>

 In your line

p '...well that\'s an OK number but don\'t you think ' + fav2 + ' is a
little bit bigger and better?'

You are "adding" 3 parts:

 '...well that\'s an OK number but don\'t you think '
# this is a string (instance of String)

fav2
# this is a Fixnum (could also be Bignum is very big number)

' is a little bit bigger and better?'
# this is a string again

Now, the '+' operator cannot handle adding strings and numbers.

Either:

1) you add numbers:

puts 1 + 3 + 4  #=> 8

2) you add strings:

puts "I am" + " studying" + " ruby"

Now, you can convert numbers to strings with to_s

and you can convert strings to number with to_i  (or to_f for floats).

So, this will work too:

puts "This is a nicer number:" + 36.to_s

puts 3 + "4".to_i + 5

I leave the exercise to you for your specific code.

HTH,

Peter

-- 
Peter Vandenabeele
http://twitter.com/peter_v
http://rails.vandenabeele.com

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