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Ruby

Gustavo Winter
PLUS
Gustavo Winter
Courses Plus Student 27,382 Points
Posted by Gustavo Winter
Gustavo Winter
Courses Plus Student 27,382 Points

The statement "Case / When". Can i use arrow on that?

Hello. My doubt is if i can use arrow in these statements, like >= , >, <=, <, etc.

By the way, i check the Ruby-doc and dont find the answer for this.

http://ruby-doc.org/docs/keywords/1.9/Object.html#method-i-case

thanks

Joe Purdy
Joe Purdy
23,237 Points
Joe Purdy
Joe Purdy
23,237 Points

Hey Gustavo!

You can use greater than/less than operators on a case statement, but there isn't an idiomatic use case for them that I can see since these operators evaluate as boolean true/false values.

Take a look at this example:

puts "Enter x: "
x = gets.chomp.to_i

puts "Enter y: "
y = gets.chomp.to_i

case x > y
when true
  puts "#{x} is greater than #{y}"
when false
  puts "#{x} is less than #{y}"
end

This case/when script does behave as expected comparing the entered x and y values and printing whether x was greater than or less than y, but there's no need for a case statement here since there are only two possible return values, true or false. Instead you could simply use an if/else like this:

puts "Enter x: "
x = gets.chomp.to_i

puts "Enter y: "
y = gets.chomp.to_i

if x > y
  puts "#{x} is greater than #{y}"
else
  puts "#{x} is less than #{y}"
end

Case statements really shine best when you have 3 or more conditions since boolean conditions are simply covered in a basic if/else. Using greater than/less than operations is going to return a boolean so I can't think of a situation where I'd want to use them in a case statement.

I hope that helps and if you're dealing with a specific problem or situation where you want to use these types of operators in a case statement can you elaborate in more detail?

1 Answer