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This is from a Codecademy lesson and I am aware people have asked about it on here, but I want to see what is wrong with my solution in particular. Here is what they start you out with:

strings = ["HTML", "CSS", "JavaScript", "Python", "Ruby"]

# Add your code below!

Here are the instructions:

We have an array of strings we'd like to later use as hash keys, but we'd rather they be symbols.

Create a new variable, symbols, and store an empty array in it. Use .each to iterate over the strings array. For each s in strings, use .to_sym to convert s to a symbol and use .push to add that new symbol to symbols.

I apologize as the formatting did not copy over prefectly, but you get the idea.
Here is my solution:

strings = ["HTML", "CSS", "JavaScript", "Python", "Ruby"]

# Add your code below!

symbols = []
strings.each do |s|
    s.to_sym
    symbols.push(s)
end

Upon submitting this, I get the error that I did not correctly convert the string to a symbol.

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4 Answers 4

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4

You create a new symbol from the string that s points to, but you don't change s (it's still a string) and you don't use the new symbol. Instead, your loop should contain the code

symbols.push(s.to_sym)

Note that the question requires you to use .each, so the answer suggesting .map is wrong, even though it's a better way of implementing the same thing.

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3 Comments

Brief, informative, relevant. This is what I was looking for, thank-you.
even further, you can do: symbols = strings.collect(&:to_sym)
Collect and map are the same thing. Neither is allowed by the question.
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s.to_sym does convert it to symbol, but s remains a string. You did not assign it again to s like s = s.to_sym or s.to_sym!. So you basically push the s string instead of the symbol.

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0

You can map it and store it to a new variable like the instructions suggest:

symbols = strings.map{ |str| str.to_sym }

Edit:

s.to_sym returns a symbol, but you aren't storing it anywhere or saving the changes, so a non-destructive method. Instead, you should push in the returned statement, so you use s.to_sym as the argument being pushed in to your new array symbols. When calling symbols array, it should now contain all your previous strings translated into symbols. 

strings.each {|s| symbols.push(s.to_sym) }
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2 Comments

Nowhere in the instructions does it suggest you use the .map syntax. I appreciate the help, but how do I fix the code I already have?
Ah my bad. I think its an issue of what is being returned. I will edit my post soon
0 
strings = ["HTML", "CSS", "JavaScript", "Python", "Ruby"]
symbols=[]
strings.each do |word|
   word.downcase!
     if word.include? "s"
    symbols.push("s".to_sym)
   end
end
print symbols
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4 Comments

This returns [:s, :s]nil to the console
But Ruby still does not like it - not sure why?
I can't tell for sure if this is supposed to be an answer, but the comments suggest it's not finished. If you have another question, please ask it by clicking the Ask Question button; you may want to include a link to this one for context. Or, once you gain a bit more rep, you will be able to post comments. Until then, please do not use answers as a workaround.
Hi I'm a newbie coder and to this site - I did include some text for help on why my solution above seems to return correctly to the console but threw up an error message. However, the post above would only accept code and did not accept my #comment#. I'll try and figure out how this sites works.

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