Basic Ruby Coding

Question

Just finished Basic Ruby. Playing with some basic function/coding/etc. Unable to figure out what is causing/how to stop the errors in my below code. The error is below the code snippet, minus the numerical input. ``` print "Please enter your name: " name = gets puts "Hello #{name}" print "What is your age? " age = gets puts "Thank you. Doing calculations." results = (age / 2 + 7) puts "Calculations complete. Results: #{results}" ``` testing.rb:9:in

': undefined method/' for "(Numerical input for age) ":String (NoMethodError)

Stone Preston · Accepted Answer

you assign the age variable the string entered by the user. since gets returns a string you need to convert the return value of gets to an integer to be able to do math on it:
```
print "Please enter your name: "
name = gets
puts "Hello #{name}"
print "What is your age? "
//convert whatever the user enters to an integer
age = Integer(gets)
puts "Thank you. Doing calculations."
results = (age / 2 + 7)
puts "Calculations complete. Results: #{results}"
```
this of course assumes the user is going to enter integers each time.

Nicholas Olsen · Answer

I suspect "gets" gives you a string, so you'll have to convert it to a number if you want to do math with it. You can see that ruby strings have a "to_i" method that converts them into integers. (http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-2.1.2/String.html#method-i-to_i)
```ruby
print "What is your age? "
age = gets.to_i
results = (age / 2 + 7)
puts "Calculations complete. Results: #{results}"
```
There is one other thing you'll have to look out for: if the user provides "0" as their age, you will get an error. You'll have to check and make sure it isn't 0 if you want to avoid that.

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Nyki Lawson

Nyki Lawson

Basic Ruby Coding

2 Answers

Stone Preston

Stone Preston

Nicholas Olsen

Nicholas Olsen