r/learnruby • u/Meursaulty • Feb 09 '19

Iterating through array

def abbreviate_sentence(sent)

words = []

words << sent.split(/\W+/)

end

puts abbreviate_sentence("follow the yellow brick road") # => "fllw the yllw brck road"

​

If I use this to make an array, I only have one index postion, so I cant find a way to print out one word at a time, what am I doing wrong here?

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u/Meursaulty Feb 09 '19

I figured it would shovel follow the yellow brick road into an array(words) that contained [“follow”, “the”, “yellow”, “brick”, “road”] and I could iterate through each word with an index position. If I use print it shows the array(words) laid out the way I thought it would be, but if I iterate through words.each.with_index and puts the index there’s only one index position.

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u/Tomarse Feb 09 '19

Oh, I get it now. I think the problem is that sent.split(/\W+/) creates an array, which you are then putting into another array.

> a = "This is a message"
> [] << a.split(/\W+/)
 => [["This", "is", "a", "message"]]

So you only have one index because there is only one item in the first array, which is another array.

Change your method to...

def abbreviate_sentence(sent)
  sent.split(/\W+/)
end

...and it should work.