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Ruby

Wiley Conte
Wiley Conte
9,618 Points
Posted by Wiley Conte
Wiley Conte
9,618 Points

.push issues inside a .each loop

Hi all thanks for taking the time to help if you are able. Desired output is [[direction, north], [direction, south], [direction, east]] . An array of arrays. Here is my test code that I want to run: 

  sentence = "north south east"
  words = sentence.split
  array_sentence = []

  words.each do |word|

    if word.include?('north' || 'east' || 'west' || 'south')
        array_sentence.push(['direction', word])
   end
end

puts array_sentence

From my testing, it seems the .push line is causing the loop to run through only once, and the output is [direction, north] when it should have all three items from my sentence. Thank you in advance!

2 Answers

andren
andren
28,558 Points
andren
andren
28,558 Points

When you are trying to debug an issue (especially when looping), an easy way to get information is to place a bunch of puts statements in your code to get an idea of what is happening while your code runs.

Like this for example:

sentence = "north south east"
words = sentence.split
array_sentence = []

words.each do |word|
  puts "The word is: " + word
  puts "Result of check is: " + word.include?('north' || 'east' || 'west' || 'south').to_s
  if word.include?('north' || 'east' || 'west' || 'south')
    array_sentence.push(['direction', word])
  end
end

puts array_sentence

If you run that code the result will be this:

The word is: north
Result of check is: true
The word is: south
Result of check is: false
The word is: east
Result of check is: false

So you can see that the loop is indeed running the correct number of times, however the check you have written only works when "north" is passed in.

The reason for this is that you cannot pass multiple strings to the include method, that's not how the || operator works. If you wanted to use || and include to check multiple strings then you would have to call the method multiple times.

Like this:

sentence = "north south east"
words = sentence.split
array_sentence = []

words.each do |word|
  if word.include?('north') || word.include?('east') || word.include?('west') || word.include?('south')
    array_sentence.push(['direction', word])
  end
end

puts array_sentence

That would work, but there are more efficient ways of doing this type of check. One pretty simple one would be to place the strings you are looking for in an array and then call include to check if the word is included in the array.

Like this:

sentence = "north south east"
words = sentence.split
array_sentence = []

words.each do |word|
  if ["north", "east", "west", "south"].include?(word)
    array_sentence.push(['direction', word])
  end
end

puts array_sentence
Wiley Conte
Wiley Conte
9,618 Points
Wiley Conte
Wiley Conte
9,618 Points

Thank you - very helpful!