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Day 18 of 30 Ruby Coding Challenge - Finding the Missing Number Game

We're going to play a game: find the missing number in a given array. This first solution will be not that great but we'll get the job done!

Alexandre Gama user avatar by
Alexandre Gama
·
Updated Jul. 22, 20 · Tutorial
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Hey friends!

This is the blog post version of the Youtube video from the 30 Ruby Coding Challenges in 30 Days series


Let’s go straight to the point

Coding Challenge

Create a function that takes an array of numbers between 1 and 10 (excluding one number) and returns the missing number.

A few points:

  • The array of numbers will be unsorted (not in order).
  • Only one number will be missing.

Examples

Ruby
xxxxxxxxxx
1
 
1
find_missing_num([1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]) ➞ 5
2
3
find_missing_num([7, 2, 3, 6, 5, 9, 1, 4, 8]) ➞ 10
4
5
find_missing_num([10, 5, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 3, 9]) ➞ 7


Pretty simple, isn’t it?

Algorithm in Ruby

Let’s break the algorithm down to a few small steps:

Step 1

We need to go through a list of items (an array), going from 1 to 10.

Ruby
xxxxxxxxxx
1
 
1
def find_missing_num(array)
2
  [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10].each do |item|
3
    end
4
end
5
6
array = [1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
7
find_missing_num(array)


Ruby provides us a really better way to do this:

Ruby
xxxxxxxxxx
1
 
1
def find_missing_num(array)
2
  (1..10).each do |item|
3
    end
4
end
5
6
array = [1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
7
find_missing_num(array)


Step 2

We’re going to compare each number (from 1 to 10) with the numbers in the given array.

Ruby
xxxxxxxxxx
1
12
 
1
def find_missing_num(array)
2
  (1..10).each do |item|
3
    array.each do |number|
4
      if item == number
5
        break # breaking the execution
6
      end      
7
    end
8
  end
9
end
10
11
array = [1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
12
find_missing_num(array)


We break the execution once if find the desired number because we don’t need to continue looking for the number

Step 3

Because we want to return the number that wasn’t found in the array, I’m going to create a local variable to indicate that.

Ruby
xxxxxxxxxx
1
17
 
1
def find_missing_num(array)
2
  (1..10).each do |item|
3
    found = false
4
    array.each do |number|
5
      if item == number
6
        found = true
7
        break
8
      end      
9
    end
10
    if found = false
11
      return item
12
    end
13
  end
14
end
15
16
array = [1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
17
find_missing_num(array)


That’s it!

I know, that’s not beautiful but it works : )

Do you have a better/different version? Drop that in the comments and bring more healthy discussions :)

Thanks for the visit and in the next coding challenge we’re going to explore a more decent way to solve this puzzle, see you there!

Don’t forget to come by and say hi!

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Coding (social sciences)

Published at DZone with permission of Alexandre Gama. See the original article here.

Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.

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