How to extract the sign of an integer in Ruby?

Question

I need a function which returns/prints the sign on an integer. So far I came up with this:

def extract_sign(integer)   integer >= 0 ? '+' : '-' end 

Is there a built-in Ruby method which does that?

Answer 1

Here is a simple way to do it:

x = -3 "++-"[x <=> 0] # => "-"  x = 0 "++-"[x <=> 0] # => "+"  x = 3 "++-"[x <=> 0] # => "+" 

or

x = -3 "±+-"[x <=> 0] # => "-"  x = 0 "±+-"[x <=> 0] # => "±"  x = 3 "±+-"[x <=> 0] # => "+" 

Answer 2

I think that it's nonsense not to have a method that just gives -1 or +1. Even BASIC has such a function SGN(n). Why should we have to deal with Strings when it's numbers we want to work with. But's that's just MHO.

def sgn(n)   n <=> 0 end.