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Ben Greenberg
Ben Greenberg

Posted on • Originally published at dev.to on

49 Days of Ruby: Day 6 - Integers

Welcome to day 6 of the 49 Days of Ruby! 🎉

In the past few days we have covered variables, strings, introduced ourselves to IRB and a lot more! Today, we are going to learn a bit about another very important data type: Integer.

What is an Integer?

Any number that can be written without a fraction.

In other words, 5, 15, -300, 0, 829304923231231 are all integers. Whereas, 5.3, 0.2, -4.675 are not. What are those latter numbers then? Those fractional numbers are a different data type called a Float.

Integers, like Strings, can be stored inside variables to be referenced later:

drink_order = 1

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Did you notice that we did not wrap the 1 in either single or double quotes? If we wrapped it inside quote marks then it would no longer be an Integer, it would become a String.

As an aside, what is the value of "1" + 1?

In some languages, the language itself will fix your math above and either convert the 1 in quote marks into an Integer, or the 1 without quote marks into a String. In the former, the correction would yield 2 as the answer. In the latter, the correction would yield 11 as the answer.

What does Ruby do?

TypeError (no implicit conversion of Integer into String)

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Ruby does not automatically fix it for you, but rather returns to you an error. Each error belongs to a group of errors (a Class) that tells you a bit about what type of error it is. In this case, the error is a TypeError because the types of data you are trying to add together do not match.

Back to our new drink_order variable holding the Integer 1. If you recall, yesterday we created a customer named Ben with a favorite drink of Iced Americano. We then printed that data out using string interpolation.

We can do the same thing here with our Integer!

"Hi, #{name}! Welcome back! Would you like to order another #{favorite_drink}? You previously ordered it #{drink_order} times.

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This would output the following:

Hi, Ben! Welcome back! Would you like to order another Iced Americano? You previously ordered it 1 times.

We see that you can interpolate an Integer into a new String, just like other Strings.

Another important item to know about Integers is how they interact with Floats. Remember from above that a Float is a fractional number, like 5.2, for example.

What happens if we try to add 3 + 5.2?

2.5.1 :002 > 3 + 5.2
 => 8.2 

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The return value is a new Float: 8.2.

That's it for today! Tomorrow we will explore Booleans!

Come back tomorrow for the next installment of 49 Days of Ruby! You can join the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #49daysofruby.

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