Ruby programming assignment

Question

So i need some support with my Ruby assignment, I'm not from US so you have to excuse my English.

We are building a hotel and this is the second assignment. It's a console based application and I have a class called main.rb that handles the runtime and a guest-class.

In this second assignment we are to preload the app with five guest-objects, I guess I have to use an array but don't really know how. Below are my guest class and my main class is simply a while-loop with a case statement.

I need help with: 1. adding 5 guests (not to a db or textfile only to a array or so) when the program starts 2. the hotel has 20 rooms and i need to randomize the room number and exclude already rented rooms

// Hope you can help Thanks

 class Guest                 
  #Instance variables.
  attr_accessor :firstName, 
    :lastName,
    :address,
    :phone,
    :arrival,
    :plot,
    :gauge

  #Constructor sets the guest details.
  def initialize(first, last, adress, phone, arrival) 
    @firstName = first
    @lastName = last
    @address = address
    @phone = phone
    @arrival = arrival
    @plot = range_rand(1,32)
    @gauge = range_rand(2000,4000)
  end

  #Using rand()-method to randomize a value between min and max parameters.   
  def range_rand(min,max) 
    min + rand(max-min)
  end

  def to_string
    "Name = #{@firstName} , Plot = #{@plot}"
  end
end 

Answer 1

I think what you mean is that you want 5 guest objects. You could put them in an array by creating an array literal and then adding guests to it

@guests = []
@guests << Guest.new()
@guests << Guest.new()

now your @guests array has two guests, etc.

Answer 2

Creating an array:

number_array = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Accessing the elements of an array:

number_array[2]
# this would return the integer 3

Adding a new element to an array:

number_array << 6
# this would return [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

You can create a new guest by doing something like this:

Guest.new("John", "Doe", "1500 main street", "123-456-7890", "1/1/2010")

Since this is a homework assignment, I'll leave it to you to combine everything into a working solution ;)

Answer 3

Other people have already answered the first part of your question, so I'll help you with the second one (I'll provide the minimum, so that you still have some work to do :) )

You could create an array containing the 20 room numbers :

empty_rooms = (1..20).to_array

Then for each guest :
1) Take a random number in this array ( hint : randomize the index )
2) Remove this number from the array
3) And assign the room number to a Guest
4) Add the guest to the array of guests