This in part sad and in part good news, but let’s get with the sad part first. As my daily kata building practice I try to find out a problem and work on it.

Today’s problem was the Format Words problem; here is the statement:

Complete the method so that it formats the words into a single comma separated value. 
The last word should be separated by the word 'and' instead of a comma. 
The method takes in an array of strings and returns a single formatted string. 
Empty string values should be ignored. Empty arrays or null/nil values being passed into the method should result in an empty string being returned.

Pretty straightforward so I wrote a couple of specs for it:

require 'minitest/autorun'

describe FormatWords do 
  it 'returns a proper formatted word for an array of three words' do 
    FormatWords.(['ninja', 'samurai', 'ronin']).must_equal 'ninja, samurai and ronin'
  end

  it 'returns the same array for none words in it' do 
    FormatWords.([]).must_equal []
  end

  it 'returns a proper formatted word for two empty words and a word' do 
    FormatWords.(['','','three']).must_equal 'three'
  end

  ... 
end

Which leads me to a very crappy and ugly implementation, by the end of this kata I did not have any energy left to refactor it I just look at it and start to reflect on what happen. Here is the implementation:

def format_words(words)
  return "" if words.nil? 
  words = words.reject(&:empty?) 
  return "" if words.empty?
  return words[0] if words.size == 1
  temp = words[0..-2].map { |word| word unless word.empty? }.compact
  return "#{temp.join(', ')} and #{words[-1]}" if temp.size > 1
  "#{temp[0]} and #{words[-1]}"
end

What did I learn about this kata?

  • #reject: Which helps me to remove blank strings from the array
  • Also this kata re starts a crusade that I have with TDD. I really want to know which are the proper tests to write which are the correct edge cases and actually I just realize I don’t know that, yet. So I will start to research; that last part was the happy thing that happen ;-)