Ruby: Method within a class refuses to be modified over multiple lines

Question

I am currently doing an rspec ruby tutorial. One of the problems requires me to write a book_title program that utilizes some of the capitalization rules in English. The tests are extremely long but to give you a few ideas of what it is asking for I've included the first last tests below:

require 'book'

describe Book do

  before do
    @book = Book.new
  end

  describe 'title' do
    it 'should capitalize the first letter' do
      @book.title = "inferno"
      @book.title.should == "Inferno"
    end

   specify 'the first word' do
       @book.title = "the man in the iron mask"
       @book.title.should == "The Man in the Iron Mask"
     end
    end
  end
end

My code is:

class Book
    attr_accessor :title

    def initialize(title = nil)
        @title = title
    end

    def title=(book_title = nil)
        stop_words = ["and", "in", "the", "of", "a", "an"]
        @title = book_title.split(" ").each{ |word| 
            unless stop_words.include?(word)
                word.capitalize!
            end}.join(" ").capitalize
    end
end 

This issue I am having is with the def title= method. @title = book_title.split(...etc) all in one line because when I try and split it up, many of my previous tests fail.

Example of some code I've tried:

    @title = book_title.split(" ").each do |word|  # attempting to add words to an array
        unless stop_words.include?(word)           # to capitalize each word
          word.capitalize!
        end
      end
        @title.join(" ")                               # Joining words into one string
        @title.capitalize                              # Capitalizing title's first word
    end                                                # to follow the last test

When I try this the tests fail (I am thinking it has to do with calling @title again when I try @title#join and @title#capitalize).

Some other thoughts: I was thinking about just setting the first part (the longest line ending in word.capitalize! end end to a different variable (maybe book_title or new_title) but I was wondering what the reason for even initializing or using @title would be in the first place.

Any input, as well as edits for cleaner code, would be greatly appreciated

Answer 1

The issue you're having in the second example is that Array#each returns the enumerable on which .each was called, so in this case you're getting the result from book_title.split(" ") (albeit modified by the block). You are assigning this result to the @title instance variable. Calling join on an array returns a string, but you're not doing anything with that string except allocating it. If you'd like to assign it to the title variable, you need to do @title = @title.join(" "). Same with capitalize.