FAQ: A Night at the Movies - What You'll Be Building

Frequently Asked Questions Ruby FAQ
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This community-built FAQ covers the “What You’ll Be Building” exercise from the lesson “A Night at the Movies”.

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This exercise can be found in the following Codecademy content:

Learn Ruby

FAQs on the exercise What You’ll Be Building

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2

Is there a way of continuing to ask the user for input? So for example in this exercise, once you’ve finished writing the code and you test it, if you write ‘display’, it displays all the movies. But what if you wanted to then add a book as well? How would you continue to get user input?
Thanks!

3

It seems when you have movie titles with more than one word it requires an adjustment in the code :

“medium thing”.gsub(/\s+/,"_").downcase.to_sym => :medium_thing

title = title.gsub(/\s+/,"_")

if movies[title.to_sym].nil?

4

Films are generally given proper names, and many have more than one word in the title. All we need to do is let Ruby convert them.

your command: 
add
Movie title: 
A Night At The Movies
Movie rating: 
4
A Night At The Movies added with rating 4.

puts movies

{:Crash=>4, :Babel=>4, :"A Night to Remember"=>2, :"A Night At The Movies"=>4}

Arbitrarily altering the inputs affects natural search. Ruby can handle multiple word names.

1 Like
5

Would you say this is the most concise and effective solution?

6

i don’t really have an opinion other that already stated. If the user inputs a proper name, we should endeavor to preserve it as inputted without alteration. string.to_sym is something we can convert back to the original string. If we alter it, then we lose the naturalness of the input, and cannot feasibly convert back to what it was initially, especially if the case is changed.

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7

Are you saying there is a way to use .to_sym? Yes or no? I did not gather that from your initial response
If so how would you go about doing so?

8

Yes, there is.

puts # prompt
title = gets.chomp
if movies[title.to_sym].nil?
    puts # prompt
    rating = gets.chomp
    movies[title.to_sym] = rating.to_i
end

The above preserves the case and word count of the user input.

See the above hash for how Ruby converts multi-word strings to symbol.

1 Like
9

Whenever I used this code the program did not recognize the title as already in the hash unless I included the underscore between each word of the title as it was written in symbol

10

That would suggest the hard coded values were snake_case. Use the symbol pattern shown above when hard coding the hash.

:"A Night at the Movies" => 4
1 Like
11

Continuing the discussion from FAQ: A Night at the Movies - What You'll Be Building:

Hello, everyone!
I hope you’re fine.
I think this exercise can be improved by adding the .capitalize() to the title = gets.chomp because when you enter a movie name in lowercase (memento) it says Movie not found!. I know it is only an exercise but I think it can be better by adding this.
Thanks