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Ruby Ruby Operators and Control Structures Logical Operators The Or (||) Operator

luke brusseau
luke brusseau
2,268 Points
Posted by luke brusseau
luke brusseau
2,268 Points

Ruby operators and control structures &&

I am a bit confused on what im doing wrong

ruby.rb 
def valid_command?(command)
  if command = ("y") || ("yes") || ("Y") || ("YES") ||
      return "true"
  end
end
Alexander Davison
Alexander Davison
65,469 Points

Do this instead:

def valid_command?(command)
  if (command == "y") || (command == "yes") || (command == "Y") || (command == "YES")
    return true
  end
end

and yes, do this:

return "true"

into

return true

2 Answers

Jason Anders
MOD
Jason Anders
Treehouse Moderator 145,858 Points
Jason Anders
Jason Anders
Treehouse Moderator 145,858 Points

Hi Luke,

You are on the right track and very close. First you have an extra || at the end on the conditional. Second, so Ruby knows that all those values are being evaluated as one condition, you just need to wrap them all in a set of parenthesis.

def valid_command?(command)
  if command = (("y") || ("yes") || ("Y") || ("YES"))
      return "true"
  end
end

Keep Coding! :)

Tomasz Jaśkiewicz
Tomasz Jaśkiewicz
5,399 Points
Tomasz Jaśkiewicz
Tomasz Jaśkiewicz
5,399 Points

Hi, Luke!

I assume that you want to check if command belongs to this list: "y", "yes", "Y", "YES". If you want to check whether command is valid you can do smth like this:

def valid_command?(command)
  command_list = %w(y yes)
  command_list.include?(command.downcase)
end

  command_list = %w(y yes)

This line will create an array of strings: ['y', 'yes']

  command.downcase

downcase method will return string in lowercase: "YEs".downcase -> "yes"

  command_list.include?(command.downcase)

include? method invoked on array (command_list) will return true if our array (['y', 'yes']) includes our string (eg. 'y') or false if not. Our valid_command? method will return finally the same value as last line defined in our method. We do not need a return statement here.

What's wrong about your code is that you can't leave || at the end of line because Ruby waits for next argument then. Beware of using = and == operators. The first one is an assignment operator and it won't compare anything. == is a operator you're looking for.

Keep going! Ask questions and enjoy! Good job! :)

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