Parameters with default values in Ruby - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Parameters with default values

📖 Scenario: You are creating a simple greeting system for a website. Sometimes users provide their name, and sometimes they don't. You want to write a method that can greet users by name if given, or greet them with a generic message if no name is provided.

🎯 Goal: Build a Ruby method called greet that takes one parameter name with a default value. The method should return a greeting message using the given name or a default greeting if no name is given.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a method called greet with one parameter name that has a default value of "Guest".

Inside the method, return a string that says "Hello, <name>!" where <name> is the parameter value.

Call the greet method twice: once without any argument, and once with the argument "Alice".

Print the results of both method calls.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Default parameters are useful when you want to make your methods flexible and easy to use without always requiring all information.

💼 Career

Understanding default parameters helps you write cleaner, more maintainable code in Ruby, which is important for many programming jobs.

1

Create the greet method with a name parameter

Write a method called greet that takes one parameter named name. Do not add a default value yet.

Ruby

def greet(name)
  # Your code here
end

Need a hint?

Use def to define the method and include name inside parentheses.

2

Add a default value "Guest" to the name parameter

Modify the greet method so that the parameter name has a default value of "Guest".

Ruby

def greet(name = "Guest")
  # Your code here
end

Need a hint?

Set the default value by writing name = "Guest" inside the parentheses.

3

Return a greeting message using the name parameter

Inside the greet method, return a string that says "Hello, <name>!" where <name> is the value of the name parameter. Use string interpolation.

Ruby

def greet(name = "Guest")
  # Your code here
end

Need a hint?

Use "Hello, #{name}!" to create the greeting string.

4

Call greet with and without an argument and print the results

Call the greet method twice: once without any argument, and once with the argument "Alice". Print both results using puts.

Ruby

def greet(name = "Guest")
  "Hello, #{name}!"
end

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use puts greet and puts greet("Alice") to print the greetings.