Getting input from the Ruby console using gets and chomp

Now that you know how to print values to the console, the next logical step is to know how to get input from users. In this section, we'll walk through how to use the built-in gets and chomp methods in Ruby.

In a real-world application, you'll most likely use web forms or some tool like that to get an input. However, using console tools you'll be able to mimic what a user types into a program.

Code implementation

We're going to start by asking the question, What is your name? and print that out to the console:

puts "What is your name?"  
name = gets 

This code will print the first line to ask the question. In the second line, we are creating a variable called name to hold the value given by the user. The gets method prompts the user to enter a value. So, when you execute this code, this is what you should see:

You may notice we have a small problem with gets. It returns the value you enter along with the end of line character, \n, and this...