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Part 1: Asking Questions

3:10 with Jason Seifer

Now that we're familiar with loops and iteration, let's practice our knowledge by writing a simple contact list program.

Code Samples

Here is the code we write in this portion of the video.

First, we set up a contact list array:

contact_list = []

Next, we define the ask method. We're going to be asking the user for input quite a bit so the ask method will repeat the logic for us.

def ask(question, kind="string")
  print question + " "
  answer = gets.chomp
  answer = answer.to_i if kind == "number"
  return answer
end

The ask method takes two arguments and defaults to having the kind of answer be a string. This will let us return numeric values if we want.

Finally, we test the ask method:

answer = ask("What is your name?")
puts answer

[SOUND] Now 0:00
that we're familiar with Loops and Iteration, let's practice 0:04
our knowledge by writing a simple contact list program using Workspaces. 0:08
Now we're gonna write a simple contact list program, and 0:13
this is what it looks like. 0:17
It will ask what the person's name is, and then do we want to add a phone number? 0:18
And then, we'll enter a couple phone numbers. 0:31
We don't want to add another person, and it will print out the contact list. 0:34
So let's go ahead and get started. 0:40
Let's go ahead and create a new file and we'll call it contact_list.rb. 0:44
So first we will have our contact list be an array and let's set that up, up front. 0:55
We now have an empty array. 1:04
Now one thing that we're going to be doing a lot is asking the user a question. 1:07
Let's go ahead and create a method called ask, since we're going to be asking 1:11
questions so often, and we'll call this method ask. 1:15
Now let's go ahead and send in a couple arguments. 1:25
So we're going to ask a question, and we'll say that the kind 1:30
of question we're asking by default is going to be a string. 1:37
That's going to be what we want to get back from the user. 1:42
So let's go ahead and print the question plus a space, 1:45
which will give somebody time to respond. 1:51
Now, we will get the answer from standard input, remove any trailing white space, 1:56
and then we'll say the answer is going to be an integer 2:05
if the kind is a number. 2:11
And then we will return the answer. 2:18
Now let's just run this, and we'll just say answer equals ask, what is your name. 2:23
And since we gave it a kind of string, we don't need to enter that, 2:34
since it has what's called a default value of an argument. 2:40
And then let's just print out the answer and see what happens. 2:46
Okay, so we now know that we are getting back a variable from the ask method. 2:52
In our next video, we're going to go ahead and create the add contact method, 3:01
which is going to use the ask method which we just wrote. 3:07

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