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Ruby

Taylor Porter
Taylor Porter
2,338 Points
Posted by Taylor Porter
Taylor Porter
2,338 Points

How to shorten all of your Or Operators (||) (If there IS a way)

After I completed The Or (||) Operator challenge, I thought how do you shorten this so I don't repeat myself.

def valid_command?(command)

if (command = "y") || (command = "yes") || (command = "Y") || (command = "YES") return "true"

end end

1 Answer

Angela Visnesky
Angela Visnesky
20,927 Points
Angela Visnesky
Angela Visnesky
20,927 Points

Hi Taylor, You could shorten it by :

def valid_command?(command)
     if command.upcase = "Y" || command.upcase = "YES"
        return true
     end
end

You could also do the same with downcase. I hope this helps!

Jason Anello
Jason Anello
Courses Plus Student 94,610 Points

That's probably about the shortest you can get it using the || operator.

One further simplification could be:

def valid_command?(command)
    command = command.upcase
     if command == "Y" || command == "YES"
        return true
     end
end

Oh, I just realized that the code posted contains single equal signs. These should be double equal signs. We're doing an equality comparison here and not assignment.

I don't think it was taught in the course but arrays have an include? method that makes doing this sort of thing easier.

def valid_command?(command)
  if ["y", "yes", "Y", "YES"].include?(command)
    true
  end
end

This basically checks if command matches one of the elements in the array and returns true if it does or false otherwise.

And you could also shorten the array down to 2 elements if you call the upcase or downcase method on command like Angela showed in her code.

Doing it like this would be especially useful if you had something like 10 commands to check against.