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iOS Swift Collections and Control Flow Control Flow With Loops Working With Loops

Brent Caswell
Brent Caswell
5,343 Points

Need some help with this code challenge

I'm calling the array with a for loop from within the while loop just like the instructions are asking. I even printed the result of "sum" as a test and I can see the sum is being generated several times with the last sum being the correct one - I think. Not sure how to output one specific number from a loop, if that's what the challenge is asking for. Any help would be appreciated!

loops.swift
let numbers = [2,8,1,16,4,3,9]
var sum = 0
var counter = 0

// Enter your code below

while counter <= numbers.count {
    counter += 1
    for number in numbers {
        sum += number
    }
}

1 Answer

This is a pretty creative solution and you're getting the right number if you divide that number by 8.

There are two things going on here. First, you're using while loop eight times when you actually want seven, it's looping through eight times because the first time it starts by evaluating the counter and then adds 1 during the first loop's execution.

Is 0 less than 7? Yes, add one, is 1 less than 7, add 1, is 2... and so on. You could solve this in a variety of ways. You could start by setting counter to 1 instead of 0 before the loop runs, you could switch your comparison operator to < instead of <= so it will stop executing after 6, you could even do while counter <= numbers.count - 1.

I would personally choose to use the less than operator since it requires the least amount of code and it helps remind me that I should be in the mindset of counting from zero when programming.

Option 1 (counter = 1):

counter = 1
while counter <= numbers.count {
    counter += 1
}

Option 2 (<):

while counter < numbers.count {
    counter += 1
}

Option 3 (-1):

while counter <= numbers.count - 1 {
    counter += 1
}

On to the second issue, by using a while loop and a for loop you're actually looping through the numbers twice. Each time the while loop runs it then runs the for loop seven times, each time summing against the previous loop. That's why you can divide your resulting number by 8 and get the correct answer.

One thing to note here, the for loop knows explicitly how many numbers are in the array so you don't run into any problems with the wrong number of repetitions, in this case it's probably the smarter and more expressive loop to use for this purpose because you can't mess it up by using the wrong comparison operator or starting from the wrong first number.

Why did you think the directions call for both a while loop and a for loop? Looking at the directions I don't see anything that indicates to me that you are supposed to use both.

Here's what I used when I went through this challenge and I just verified that it still will complete it successfully:

while counter < numbers.count {
    sum += numbers[counter]
    counter += 1
}

I hope that helps!

Brent Caswell
Brent Caswell
5,343 Points

Thanks Chris this is super helpful! I missed the idea that you could use the counter constant as a way of not just counting for the purposes of limiting the number of loops of the while loop, but also use it as the index of the array when pulling in the items of the array to add them all together. I thought a for loop was the only way to do that.

Glad I could help Brent!