Dice roller in Ruby (mainly for D&D)

Question

I have been working with Ruby for about a week or two now, and I wanted to create a dice-rolling application that intakes any string (e.g. 1d4 + 1 or 3d20 + 4) and outputs the correct dice rolling.

def roll(amount = 0, sides = 0)
    #this is the function that gets a random roll with the amount of sides and the amount of dice inputted.
    srand
    total = 0
    (amount.to_i).times do 
        total += rand(1..sides.to_i)
    end
    return total
end

while true
    raw_input = gets.chomp.to_s
    if raw_input == "exit"
        abort("May your rolls be ever natural.")
    end
    proc_input = raw_input.tr("^0-9", " ")
    #this keeps all the numbers from the string input. 
    output = proc_input.split()
    if (output[2]) == nil 
        mod = 0
    else 
        mod = output[2]
    end
    fin = roll(output[0], output[1]) + mod.to_i
    puts "#{fin.to_s}"
end

Answer 1

Nice code overall, pretty readable, though there is space for improvements.

1) You don't have to return from ruby methods.

2) Good use of Enumerable methods will make code cleaner.

3) Use loop instead of while true

4) Also consider keyword arguments, as calling roll(2, 4) looks kind of cryptic.

Will all that in mind, we can turn your code into something like:

def roll(amount = 0, sides = 0)
  # rand(1..0) will return nil btw
  amount.to_i.times.sum { |t| rand(1..sides.to_i) }
end

loop do
  input = gets.chomp.to_s

  abort("May your rolls be ever natural.") if input == "exit"

  amount, sides, mod = input.tr("^0-9", " ").split
  fin = roll(amount, sides) + mod.to_i # nil converts to 0

  puts fin
end