Why does this ruby sequence not work for double digit numbers?

Question

I was creating a program with ruby to organises sequences of numbers. It worked perfectly except when two digit numbers were involved, here is the code:

print "Hello participant today we will be rearranging your numbers from smallest to largest, press enter to continue!!"
gets.chomp

print "Please enter your first number"
n1 = gets.chomp

print "Please enter your second number"
n2 = gets.chomp

print "Please enter your third number"
n3 = gets.chomp

print "Please enter your fourth number"
n4 = gets.chomp

print "Please enter your fifth number"
n5 = gets.chomp

a = [n1, n2, n3, n4, n5]

print "your numbers from smallest to largest are: #{a.sort!}"
gets.chomp

print "thank you for participating, See you next time!!"

Answer 1

Sort array of strings or array of integers

[n1, n2, n3, n4, n5] is an array of strings, and strings are compared with lexicographic order.

["1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9", "10", "11", "12"].sort
#=> ["1", "10", "11", "12", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9"]

["12", "11", "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9", "10"].sort_by(&:to_i)
#=> ["1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9", "10", "11", "12"]

So you need :

print "your numbers from smallest to largest are: #{a.sort_by(&:to_i)}"

or just convert your string array to an integer array :

a = [n1, n2, n3, n4, n5].map(&:to_i)

print "your numbers from smallest to largest are: #{a.sort}"

Refactoring

Here's a shorter way to write your script :

puts "Hello participant today we will be rearranging your numbers from smallest to largest, press enter to continue!!"
gets

a = %w(first second third fourth fifth).map do |ordinal|
  puts "Please enter your #{ordinal} number"
  gets.to_i
end

puts "Your numbers from smallest to largest are: #{a.sort}"
gets

puts "Thank you for participating, See you next time!!"