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Learning to Program in Ruby: By Example

Recall the Wrong Proposals

Explore how to enhance your Ruby hangman game by storing wrong letter guesses in a collection. Learn to display these letters sorted alphabetically and without duplicates to improve game feedback and player experience.

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Storing the wrong letters

Displaying the number of letters of the hidden word and the found letters is not enough to help the player. It’s also useful to show the wrong letters that they proposed. To do this, we are going to store the wrong letters in the same way as we accumulate the correct letters in a collection.

Ruby
require_relative "word_info"
hidden_word = "fuchsia"
found_letters = []
wrong_letters = []
loop do
  info = word_info(hidden_word, found_letters)
  puts info
  puts
  print "Wrong letters: "
  puts wrong_letters.sort.uniq.join(" ")
  puts
  print "Give me a letter: "
  answer = gets
  answer = answer.chomp.downcase
  if answer == 'stop'
    exit
  end
  if answer.length > 1
    puts "You must give only one letter!"
  elsif answer.empty?
  elsif hidden_word.include?(answer)
    puts "The letter is part of the hidden word"
    if found_letters.include?(answer)
    else
      found_letters << answer
    end
  else
    puts "Invalid letter"
    wrong_letters << answer.upcase
  end
  
end

Let’s have a look at the updated code:

  • We add another collection named wrong_letters in line 6.

  • We add the wrong letters in line 41, right after the display of the message saying that the letter is not in the hidden word. This ...