A Few More Things to Try

• Party like it’s roman_to_integer 'mcmxcix'! Come on, you knew it was coming, didn’t you? It’s the other half of your roman_numeral 1999 method. Make sure to reject strings that aren’t valid Roman numerals.

• Birthday helper! Write a program to read in names and birth dates from a text file. It should then ask you for a name. You type one in, and it tells you when that person’s next birthday will be (and, for the truly adventurous, how old they will be). The input file should look something like this:

  Christopher Alexander, Oct 4, 1936

  Christopher Lambert, Mar 29, 1957

  Christopher Lee, May 27, 1922

  Christopher Lloyd, Oct 22, 1938

  Christopher Pine, Aug 3, 1976

  Christopher Plummer, Dec 13, 1927

  Christopher Walken, Mar 31, 1943

  The King of Spain, Jan 5, 1938

  (That would be me Christopher Pine, not the young James T. Kirk; I don’t care when he was born.) You’ll probably want to break each line up and put it in a hash, using the name as your key and the date as your value. In other words: words:

  birth_dates['The King of Spain'] = 'Jan 5, 1938'

  (You can store the date in some other format if you prefer.)

  Though you can do it without this tip, your program might look prettier if you use the each_line method for strings. It works pretty much like each does for arrays, but it returns each line of the multiline string one at a time (but with the line endings, so you might need to chomp them). Just thought I’d mention it….