Perseverence

I had the following exercise to complete as part of my pre course at Tealeaf:

Create the data structure that you created in the previous example for Joe Smith using loops instead of assignment. Some helpful methods might be the Array shift and first method.

This was the solution:

contact_data = ["joe@email.com", "123 Main st.", "555-123-4567"] 
contacts = {"Joe Smith" => {}} 
fields = [:email, :address, :phone] 

contacts.each do |name, hash| 
  fields.each do |field| 
    hash[field] = contact_data.shift 
  end 
end

I wanted to know if this still worked if there was more than one pair in the hash and more elements in the contact_data array.

I changed the hash and array as follows:

contacts = {"Joe Smith" => {}, "Jason Hegarty" => {}, "Vic Rance" => {}} 
contact_data = [
 ["joe@email.com", "123 Main st.", "555-123-4567"],
 ["jason@email.com", "124 Main st.", "555-123-4567"],
 ["vic@email.com", "125 Main st.", "555-123-4567"]
]

but this didn’t work and just assigned nil to each of the keys in the 2nd and 3rd hash pair.

I tried another way but it only worked when there are two pairs in the hash so I needed to find another way. I needed to somehow check to see if the first array was empty and if it was delete it from the array before looping through once more. I headed on over to ruby docs and looked through the available array classes and re wrote my program:

contacts.each do |name,hash|
    fields.each do |field|
        if contact_data[0].empty?
          contact_data.delete(contact_data.first)
          hash[field] = contact_data[0].shift
          puts "-----"
          puts contact_data
          puts "-----"  
        else
          hash[field] = contact_data[0].shift
          puts "-----"
          puts contact_data
          puts "-----"
        end
    end
end

puts contacts

Problem fixed! The puts were only present for the purpose of me checking the state of contact_data after each iteration.

I also posted this in the course forum and Chris posted a leaner solution and giving me a sharp reminder there is much to learn in becoming proficient in ruby:

counter = 0
contacts.each do |name, hash|
  fields.each_with_index do |field, idx|
    hash[field] = contact_data[counter][idx]
  end
  counter += 1
end

puts contacts

Thanks to:

canton7, centrx, jhass, apeiros in the ruby channel on irc, gustavo in the campfire chat room at tealeaf and Chris on the course forum.