Hi --

On Fri, 9 May 2008, globalrev wrote:

>  i have written a program that takes a sentence as input and outputs
>  the sentence with the words rearranged.
>  it is probably inefficient and can probably be done with less code.
>  it is also nondeterministic(  while (inList(temp,scr))  could go on
>  for a long time if the user is unlucky) and im not sure how to get
>  around that or if it is even possible.
>  also, if there is 2 identical words in the sentence, lets say "the" is
>  in there twice, it will loop forever. i could do
>  .uniq in the beginning but lets say i want both "the" to be in there.
>  i have to write some if duplicate then ok up to nbrofduplicates. is
>  there an easy way to do this?
> 
>  #scrambler
>  puts "Enter a sentence: "
>  sentence = gets
>  list = sentence.split()
>  scr = []
> 
>  def inList(aword,alist)
>  	inl=false
>  	for i in (0..alist.length()-1)
>  		if alist[i] == aword
>  			inl=true
>  		end
>  	end
>  	return inl
>  end

Much easier:

   def in_list?(aword, alist)
     alist.include?(word)
   end

which means you don't really need your own method; you can just call
include? on your list.

>  for x in (0..list.length()-1)
>  	temp = list[rand(list.length())]
>  	while (inList(temp,scr))
>  		temp = list[rand(list.length())]
>  	end
>  	scr = scr + temp.split()
>  end

Please lose the ()'s. They don't do anything or add any information;
they're just visual clutter. Meanwhile, see below....

>  puts "Scrambled: "
>  puts scr

In general, you're working much too hard :-) Let Ruby do it for you:

   print "Enter a sentence: "
   puts gets.split.sort_by { rand }.join(" ")


David

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