Comparing Two Strings in Ruby

comparing two strings in ruby

From what you printed, it seems var2 is an array containing one string. Or actually, it appears to hold the result of running .inspect on an array containing one string. It would be helpful to show how you are initializing them.

irb(main):005:0* v1 = "test"
=> "test"
irb(main):006:0> v2 = ["test"]
=> ["test"]
irb(main):007:0> v3 = v2.inspect
=> "[\"test\"]"
irb(main):008:0> puts v1,v2,v3
test
test
["test"]

Comparing two strings using (greater than sign) in Ruby?

String includes the Comparable module, which defines <, >, >=, etc, based on the base class's compare (<=>) method. So if string a comes alphabetically prior to string b, a <=> b returns -1, and < returns true. The same <=> method is used for sorting strings, so you can imagine that in a sorted array of strings, each string is 'less than' its neighbor to the right.

Finding the difference between strings in Ruby

All of the solutions so far ignore the fact that the second array can also have elements that the first array doesn't have. Chuck has pointed out a fix (see comments on other posts), but there is a more elegant solution if you work with sets:

require 'set'

teamOne = "Billy, Frankie, Stevie, John"
teamTwo = "Billy, Frankie, Stevie, Zach"

teamOneSet = teamOne.split(', ').to_set
teamTwoSet = teamTwo.split(', ').to_set

teamOneSet ^ teamTwoSet # => #<Set: {"John", "Zach"}>

This set can then be converted back to an array if need be.

ruby comparing two identical strings as a condition for if else

You probably meant to use and not &&:

puts 'User directory header pass' and $log.info("User directory header pass")

which evaluates puts and $log.info() separately.

The form you use evaluates like:

puts ('User directory header pass' && $log.info("User directory header pass"))

And is same as

puts (true)

I'm not sure though why you have to join two statements like that when you can just do

puts 'User directory header pass'
$log.info("User directory header pass")

String || comparison operator in Ruby

'X' || 'O' just says X or O. And since any string is truthy it always returns X. So any spot where you’ve said [('X' || 'O')], you’ve really just said ['X'].

Because of this, you’re only ever checking if a whole line of 3 is all X.

I don’t really understand how you’re trying to test this, but I feel like you’d be better off running the function twice first handing in X and then handing in O if it didn’t find X as a winner, as opposed to trying to check both as once.

Alternatively you could instead have the function return 'X', 'O', or nil and then you could have it only run the function once. The string returned would be who won and if it’s nil then no one won. I would also recommend making a loop for this. I find it easier to read.

Here's how I would solve the problem.

ROWS = [
  [1,2,3],
  [4,5,6],
  [7,8,9],

  [1,4,7],
  [2,5,8],
  [3,6,9],

  [1,5,9],
  [7,5,3],
]

def find_winner(board)
  ROWS.each do |row|
    # subtract 1 because the ROWS is 1-indexed (like a phone dial) but arrays are 0-indexed
    row_values = row.map { |v| board[v - 1] }
    return('X') if row_values.all?('X')
    return('O') if row_values.all?('O')
  end

  return(nil)
end

test1 = [
  'X', 'X', 'X',
  'O', 'X', 'O',
  'O', 'O', '',
]
puts "Winner of test1: #{find_winner(test1).inspect}"
"X"

test2 = [
  'X', '',  'X',
  'X', 'O', 'O',
  'X', 'O', 'X',
]
puts "Winner of test2: #{find_winner(test2).inspect}"
"X"

test3 = [
  'O', 'X', 'X',
  'O', 'X', 'O',
  'O', 'O', '',
]
puts "Winner of test3: #{find_winner(test3).inspect}"
"O"

test4 = [
  'O', 'X', 'O',
  'X', 'O', 'X',
  'O', 'O', 'X',
]
puts "Winner of test4: #{find_winner(test4).inspect}"
"O"

test5 = [
  'O', 'X', 'O',
  'O', 'X', 'O',
  'X', 'O', 'X',
]
puts "Winner of test5: #{find_winner(test5).inspect}"
nil

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