loop.rb

Question

Not really sure how to go about this, and I think some of that is because of how I am interpreting the instructions, but I could use some direction for this challenge.

loop.rb

def repeat(string, times)
  fail "times must be 1 or more" if times < 1
  counter = 0
  loop do
    print repeat(string)
    counter + 1
    if counter == times
       break
    end
  end 
end

Answer 1 · 2018-05-15T17:29:52Z

May 15, 2018 5:29pm

A couple issues here.

First, you're actually making a call to the repeat method from within the repeat method:

def repeat(string, times)
  # ...
    print repeat(string)

That's called "recursion", and it's probably not what you want to do. In this case, it's failing because repeat is defined to take two parameters, but you're only passing one argument. But even if it worked, it would cause an infinite loop, as repeat keeps calling itself. So don't call repeat at all. Instead, you should just say: print string.

Second issue is with this line:

    counter + 1

That does add 1 to the value in counter, but then it doesn't do anything with it. For example, if I wrote:

counter = 0
counter + 1

...counter would still be 0. Instead, you want to write counter = counter + 1, or better yet counter += 1. That will actually update the counter variable.

I made the above changes to your code, and it worked for me. Give it another shot!

Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Looking to learn something new?

Christopher Kemp

Christopher Kemp

loop.rb

1 Answer

Jay McGavren

Jay McGavren