Need Help with a Very Simple Program

[maxiscool]

I've been working my way through 'Learning to Program,' by Chris Pine, to begin to understand both Ruby and the general concepts of programming. Anyway, the little program I've written accomplishes a simple task: it asks for your favorite number, adds one to it, then returns it to you. Here it is:

                
                
puts 'Hey there, I\'m Uno.'
puts 'What\'s your favorite number?'
number = gets.chomp
better = number.to_i + 1
puts better + '...That\'s better.'

For some reason, I get an error (in terminal) that says :'String can't be coerced into Fixnum (TypeError).' Why can't this variable--which contains a numeric string--be converted into an integer?

[daveporter]

Hi Maxiscool,

Are you sure you are getting that error with the 'better = ...' line you have shown ?

I think you are getting that error with .to_s + 1 rather than to_i + 1
( which of course is an invalid statement ! )

HTH - Dave Porter

[daveporter]

puts "That's better: #{better}"

might work better for the last line !

cheers Dave

[calkie_f]

Hi,

The error is on the last line.

better is an integer on line 4 (not a numeric string), and you are trying to add a string to it in line 5. (This happens before puts is called.)

You need to convert better to a string to concatenate the rest of the string with it.

puts better.to_s + '...That\'s better.'

Good luck,
Ian