Reverse a String in Ruby

In this installment of Reverse a String in Every Language, we will be looking at another community contribution from our friend, Noah. They’ve decided to share the solution to Reverse a String in Ruby.

If this is your first time playing around in Ruby, check out our Hello World in Ruby article. After that, why not check out all the Ruby articles we have to offer.

Table of Contents

Reverse a String in Ruby

First, like always, here’s the complete solution:

if ARGV.length < 1
    puts "Usage: ruby reverse-string.rb [string]"
else
    string = ARGV[0]
    puts string.reverse
end

Right away, we begin by checking to see if the user gave us a string in the form of a command line argument:

if ARGV.length < 1
    puts "Usage: ruby reverse-string.rb [string]"

If not, we print a usage message which tells the user how to use the program.

Otherwise, we store the command line argument that the user passed into a string:

else
    string = ARGV[0]
    puts string.reverse
end

Then, we reverse the string using the builtin method of the string class and print the result onto the screen.

As we can see, our solution is very brief. That’s because we’re using a high-level language that offers many different tools, so we can concentrate on building our application instead of worrying about implementation details.

How to Run the Solution

If you have Ruby installed on your machine, you can run the following command:

ruby reverse-string.rb SomeStringHere

Alternatively, websites like REPL allow you to run code from several programming languages in your browser. Feel free to leverage one of those!

Sample Programs in Every Language

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