String Manipulation and Reversal | CodeSignal Learn

String Manipulation and Reversal | CodeSignal Learn

Introduction

Hello, and welcome! Are you ready to enhance your string manipulation skills with Ruby ? Today, we’ll tackle a fun and practical task: reversing the characters in each word of a string while maintaining the original word order. This exercise will deepen your understanding of Ruby string methods and sharpen your problem-solving skills. Let’s get started!

Task Statement and Description

The goal is to write a Ruby method that takes a string as input, reverses each word within the string, and returns a new string with the reversed words in their original order. Here’s what you need to know: The input string will have between 1 and 100 words. Words are separated by single spaces and consist of characters ranging from a to z, A to Z, 0 to 9, or underscores_. There will be no leading or trailing spaces, and double spaces won’t appear. The returned string should contain the reversed words in their original order, separated by single spaces. Example If the input string is "Hello neat rubyists_123", the function should: Reverse "Hello" to "olleH", "neat" to "taen", and "rubyists_123" to "321_stsiybur" . Combine these reversed words into a single string, producing "olleH taen 321_stsiybur" . Try solving the problem on your own first! Once you're ready, we’ll walk through the solution step by step and break it down together.

Step 1: Splitting the String into Words

The first step is to break the input string into words. Ruby’s split method is perfect for this, as it divides the string based on spaces by default and returns an array of words. Ruby input_str = "Hello neat rubyists_123" # Split the string into an array of words words = input_str.split puts words.inspect This will output: Ruby ["Hello", "neat", "rubyists_123"]

Step 2: Reversing Each Word

Once the words are separated, we can reverse each one. Ruby’s reverse method makes this easy. Using map, we can apply reverse to every word in the array. Ruby# Reverse each word reversed_words = words.map { |word| word.reverse } puts reversed_words.inspect This produces: Ruby["olleH", "taen", "321_stsiybur"]

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Step 3: Joining the Reversed Words

The final step is to combine the reversed words back into a single string. Ruby’s join method allows us to do this while specifying a separator—in this case, a single space (' '). # Join the reversed words with a space separator result = reversed_words.join(' ') puts result This outputs: "olleH taen 321_stsiybur"

Complete Method

Now, let’s bring everything together into a reusable method: def reverse_words(input_str) # Split the string into words words = input_str.split # Reverse each word reversed_words = words.map { |word| word.reverse } # Join the reversed words into a single string reversed_words.join(' ') end # Example usage puts reverse_words("Hello neat rubyists_123") # Outputs: "olleH taen 321_stsiybur" This method is concise, efficient, and adheres to Ruby best practices.

Ruby

def reverse_words(input_str)
  # Split the string into words
  words = input_str.split
  
  # Reverse each word
  reversed_words = words.map { |word| word.reverse }
  
  # Join the reversed words into a single string
  reversed_words.join(' ')
end

# Example usage
puts reverse_words("Hello neat rubyists_123")  # Outputs: "olleH taen 321_stsiybur"