Programming: Ruby

Due Date: Thursday, February 15
Points: 30

These recipes from the cookbook may be helpful as you work on this problem:

• Date and Time introduction introduction (pages 87 - 90)
• Recipe 3.3 - Printing a Date
• Array introduction (pages 123 - 125)
• Recipe 4.1 - iterating over an Array
• Recipe 4.5 - sorting an array
• Hash introduction (pages 159 - 161)
• Recipe 5.3 - Adding elements to a Hash
• Recipe 5.7 - Iterating over a Hash
• Files and Directories introduction (pages 187 - 190)
• Recipe 6.6 - Reading the contents of a file

For this homework you are going to write a program to manage an events calendar. All the events are stored in a file. When the program starts all the events should be read in from the file. Then you will provide 2 options for the user. They should be allowed to either input a date and see the events for that date, or they should be allowed to list all the events for all the days. If they choose to list all the events, the events should be listed in order with the earliest events listed first. For this problem we will only consider the day an event occurs and will not worry about the time, so events on a given day may be printed out of order.

File Format: The input file should have the name events.text. All events will be stored in 2 lines. The first line will be the date of the event and the second line will be a brief description of the event. The format of the date line will be year month day as integers separated by a single space. You should NOT assume that the events are stored in any particular order. They are simply added to the file as they come in. It is your responsibility to order the events as you read them in from the file. Here are some sample lines from the file

2007 1 21
MLK convocation at 11 in Dowstra
2007 2 8
Ruby test at 9:30 in 141 VSC
2007 1 10
Classes Begin!

Suggested approach: You are not required to follow this approach, but here is my suggestion for approaching this problem:

• Store the events in a hash that uses the date as a key. Store the events as an array. As you read in the events from the file, if the date for that event is not in the Hash, create an array of 1 element (the description of that event) and add that date and array to the Hash. If the date is already in the event add the description to the array that is stored with that date.
• To print events for a given day you need to print out all the events stored in the array for that day. Get the value associated with the date input and then iterate over that array printing them out.
• To print all the events, get all the keys and sort them. Then go through this sorted array of key values and for each key value get the array associated with that key and print out the values stored in that array.