Start a loop from 1

Question

I recently came upon the scary idea that Integer.count loops in Ruby start from 0 and go to n-1 while playing with the Facebook Engineering puzzlers. I did the dirty fix of adding one to the block variable in the beginning so that it would start at one instead.

Is there a prettier way?

Example:

10.times do |n|     n += 1     puts n end #=> 012345789 

Answer 1

Ruby supports a number of ways of counting and looping:

1.upto(10) do |i|   puts i end  >> 1.upto(10) do |i|  >     puts i |    end #=> 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 

There's also step instead of upto which allows you to increment by a step value:

>> 1.step(10,2) { |i| puts i } #=> 1 1 3 5 7 9 

Answer 2

You could use a range:

(1..10).each { |i| puts i } 

Ranges give you full control over the starting and ending indexes (as long as you want to go from a lower value to a higher value).