Architectural_Design_with_SketchUp

Architectural Design with SketchUp
As in other programming languages, Ruby has a large set of useful functions to accomplish
a whole lot of operations on arrays, such as sorting and reversing (see Appendix B for
a handy reference).
TIP
In addition to “classic” arrays, Ruby can store key-value pairs of information in a special
kind of array, a hash.
grades = Hash[“Mike” => 88, “Lucie” => 99]
Some String Peculiarities
If you use single quotes (as in ‘Hello’) to define a string, the text will be output as is. If you
use double quotes (as in “Hello”) to define a string, any inline variable (as in #{myvar}) or command
(such as the newline command \n) within the string will be interpreted. Also, if your text
contains quotes themselves, you must escape them with a leading backward-slash \. Here is
an example that illustrates this:
author = ‘someone’
puts ‘This is #{author}\’s text.\nWho wrote it?’
will output This is #{author}’s text.\nWho wrote it?. If you use double quotes instead:
author = ‘someone’
puts “This is #{author}\’s text.\nWho wrote it?”
this will be the result:
This is someone’s text.
Who wrote it?
As you can see, the newline was interpreted as such, and the author variable was inserted
into the string. Other useful escape strings are \t for inserting a tab and \\ for getting a
single backslash.
If you want to use a formatted string, use the format or sprintf function, as in:
sprintf(“%s: %d”, “Value”, 123)
This outputs Value: 123. As shown here, you can easily assign variables to placeholders
this way. This is very useful if you want to write a formatted string to a file.
Reusing Stuff: Declaring and Using Methods
As always, the more you do with what you already have, the better. Therefore, if you reuse
the same functionality more than once in your script, it makes sense to “package” it into a
method. Ruby does this by simply using the def keyword:
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def my_function( salutation, name )