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What are Conditionals?

What are Conditionals?

Learn about conditionals in Ruby.

What are conditionals?

Sometimes, we only want to perform an action if a certain criterion is met. Other times, we may want to check for a certain condition and then do one thing or another based on the answer. If this is true, then do that. Otherwise, do something else.

All practical programming languages have some way of expressing this, and in Ruby, it looks like this:

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Ruby
number = 5
if number.between?(1, 10)
  puts "The number is between 1 and 10"
elsif number.between?(11, 20)
  puts "The number is between 11 and 20"
else
  puts "The number is bigger than 20"
end

It should be clear what this does and how it works.

Explanation

Let’s walk through it step by step:

  1. Running this code prints out The number is between 1 and 10 because the ...