Defining a method

So far you have seen methods that “belong” to objects, or, in other words, are defined on objects, and can be called on objects. E.g. you have seen the method downcase which is defined on every string.

However, Ruby also knows methods that are not defined on any of these objects. They’re sort of “stand alone” methods.

For example, you can try this in irb:

$ irb
> is_a?(Object)
true

We’ll use this type of methods in this chapter because we want to focus on the characteristics of methods. If you’re curious what’s up with them have a look at the bonus chapter about the top-level object. Later when you learn how to define your own classes we also look at defining methods for these.

Ok, let’s get started.

Suppose we need to define a simple method that takes a number, adds the number 2 to it, and returns the result. Here’s how we can do that:

def add_two(number)
  number + 2
end

This defines a method. It does not use it, yet: You only build and place that vending machine, so it can be used (by yourself, or others) later.

Let’s walk through this method definition step by step:

Ruby will start reading the code at the top, and find the keyword def. This tells Ruby that we’re about to define a new method.

Methods need a name, so Ruby looks for it next, and finds the word add_two.

Ruby then checks if we define anything to “input” to the method (remember, this is optional). She finds the parentheses, and knows that we’re about to define a list of things that can be given to the method. This list is called an argument list.

An argument list defines names for objects passed to the method, enclosed by parentheses right after the method name.

In our case the argument list has one single argument number, which means our method can accept one single thing (object).

The next line is the block of code that our method has (“encapsulates”). This is also referred to as the method body. In our case that’s just one single line because the operation that our method encapsulates is very simple. Other methods (think of sort, defined on Arrays) would require more code, and are longer.

Inside the method body the arguments are known as local variables: You can see how the code in our method body uses the variable name number.

Finally the keyword end tells Ruby that we’re done with the method body, and the method definition.

All we’ve done so far is defining the method, we haven’t used it for anything, yet. We’ll do that in the next chapter.

On formatting: Note that the keywords def and end sit on the same level, while the method body is indented by two spaces. Also, there are no space before or inside the argument list, i.e. the () parentheses.