Printing a Tic-Tac-Toe board in Ruby

Question

I have two implementations of a function that prints out a basic board for Tic-Tac-Toe.

Which of these should I include and why?

def display_board(board)
  for i in 0...9
    print " #{ board[i] }"
    if (i+1)%3 != 0
      print " |"
    elsif i != 9
       print " \n#{'-'*11}\n"
    end
  end
end

def display_board(board)
  puts " #{board[0]} | #{board[1]} | #{board[2]} "
  puts "-----------"
  puts " #{board[3]} | #{board[4]} | #{board[5]} "
  puts "-----------"
  puts " #{board[6]} | #{board[7]} | #{board[8]} "
end

Answer 1

Surely version two.

• It makes no use of control structures such as for or if, it has very low Kolmogorov complexity because of that, and it is good, as it is directly related to difficulty in understanding.

• It lets you see in a single glance what the output will look like.

Answer 2

If I had to pick, I'd take the second version. Not that the first approach is bad, it just needs a refactor. I'd write:

def display_board(board)
  puts board.each_slice(3).map { |row| row.join(" | ") }.join("\n" + "-"*11 + "\n")
end