Modified #to_s to format 'Q Hearts' to 'QH'

[mjvezzani]

Finished Panda level requirements for Blackjack assignment. Based on what I observed from your programming style, I hacked together a working version first, and then figured out ways to slim down my code. At this point I'm not sure if it is a slim as it could be, but I'm relatively happy about it.

[jwo]

The way this is specified is very close to a case statement. In ruby, that looks like:

suit = case @suit
when :hearts
  "H"
when :clubs
  "C"
when :spades
  "S"
when :diamonds"
 "D"
end

However, there's a slight problem here, that if the suit is something other than a :hearts, :clubs, :spades:, :diamonds, it will be nil and cause problems later down the line. So you might:

suit = case @suit
when :hearts
  "H"
when :clubs
  "C"
when :spades
  "S"
when :diamonds
 "D"
else
  raise ArgumentError.new "Unsupported suit: #{suit}"
end

[jwo]

Thanks for the submission -- you have the procedure down!

I'd like you to think about this --

suit = "H" if @suit == :hearts

Is there another way to get "H" from :hearts ?

[mjvezzani]

Doing a bit of research, I came up with this as a possible solution:

suit = case @suit
when :hearts
  :hearts.to_s.capitalize[0]
when :spades
  :spades.to_s.capitalize[0]
when :diamonds
  :diamonds.to_s.capitalize[0]
when :clubs
  :clubs.to_s.capitalize[0]
else
  raise ArgumentError.new "Unsupported suit: #{@suit}"
end

Then, to reduce verbosity, I could define a method #initial:

def initial(suit)
  suit.to_s.capitalize[0]
end

Which produces the following results:

initial(:spades) # => "S"
initial(:clubs) # => "C"
initial(:diamonds) # => "D"
initial(:hearts) # => "H"

Thus my final code would look like this:

suit = case @suit
when :hearts
  initial(:hearts)
when :diamonds
  initial(:diamonds)
when :spades
  initial(:spades)
when :clubs
  initial(:clubs)
else
  raise ArgumentError.new "Unsupported suit: #{@suit}"
end

[jwo]

cool!

What about reducing the code down to

def to_s
  "#{@value}-#{suit.to_s.upcase[0]}"
end

or, to use the initial method:

def to_s
  "#{@value}-#{initial suit}"
end

def initial(suit)
  suit.to_s.capitalize[0]
end

Now THAT is some readable code :)