The while loop in Ruby is a control flow statement that continuously executes a block of code as long as a certain condition is true.
The basic syntax for using a while loop in Ruby is:
while condition do
# Code to be executed
end
Here's an example of a while loop that prints numbers 1 to 5:
count = 1
while count <= 5 do
puts count
count += 1
end
1
2
3
4
5
In this example, the condition count <= 5 is checked at the beginning of each iteration of the loop. If the condition is true, the code inside the loop is executed, which in this case is printing the value of the count variable and incrementing it. Once count reaches 6, the condition is evaluated as false and the loop ends.
You can also use a while loop to iterate over an array. Here's an example:
numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
i = 0
while i < numbers.length do
puts numbers[i]
i += 1
end
Output:
1
2
3
4
5
In this example, the loop continues as long as i is less than the length of the numbers array. The i variable is used as an index to access each element of the array inside the loop. The loop ends when i is equal to the length of the array.