Keyword arguments in Ruby - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Using Keyword Arguments in Ruby Methods

📖 Scenario: You are creating a simple program to greet people with personalized messages. You want to use keyword arguments in Ruby methods to make your greetings clear and flexible.

🎯 Goal: Build a Ruby method that uses keyword arguments to greet a person with their name and age. Then call the method with different keyword arguments and print the greetings.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a method called greet that takes keyword arguments name and age

Inside the method, create a greeting string using the name and age arguments

Call the greet method with keyword arguments for name and age

Print the greeting returned by the greet method

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Keyword arguments help make your Ruby methods clear and flexible, especially when many options or settings are needed. This is common in web apps, scripts, and libraries.

💼 Career

Understanding keyword arguments is important for writing clean, maintainable Ruby code in jobs like backend development, automation scripting, and working with Ruby frameworks like Rails.

1

Create the greet method with keyword arguments

Write a method called greet that takes two keyword arguments: name: and age:. Inside the method, create a variable message that stores the string "Hello, my name is #{name} and I am #{age} years old." Use string interpolation exactly as shown.

Ruby

# Define the greet method with keyword arguments name: and age:
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use def greet(name:, age:) to define the method with keyword arguments. Use double quotes and #{} for string interpolation.

2

Call the greet method with keyword arguments

Call the greet method with name: set to "Alice" and age: set to 30. Store the result in a variable called greeting.

Ruby

def greet(name:, age:)
  message = "Hello, my name is #{name} and I am #{age} years old."
end

# Call greet with name: "Alice" and age: 30
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Call the method with greet(name: "Alice", age: 30) and assign it to greeting.

3

Return the greeting message from the method

Modify the greet method to return the message variable so that the greeting string is returned when the method is called.

Ruby

def greet(name:, age:)
  message = "Hello, my name is #{name} and I am #{age} years old."
  # Return the message
  # Your code here
end

greeting = greet(name: "Alice", age: 30)

Need a hint?

Add return message as the last line inside the method.

4

Print the greeting message

Write a puts statement to print the greeting variable to the console.

Ruby

def greet(name:, age:)
  message = "Hello, my name is #{name} and I am #{age} years old."
  return message
end

greeting = greet(name: "Alice", age: 30)

# Print the greeting
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use puts greeting to print the greeting string.