niall munnelly wrote:

>[snip...]
>statement that relies on those variables alone works.  it's the last line,
>variable * variable, that breaks.
>
>i wasn't sure if the comments would be superfluous to the mail; i'll be sure
>to include them in future questions.
>
Sure - it's often useless to try to figure out why something doesn't 
work if it's not all here to examine. If something seems too long to 
post, the best thing is to try to reproduce the error in a much smaller 
script, and post the smaller script. As it turns out, the act of 
condensing your work like that is often exactly what it takes to make 
you see the answer yourself.

In this case though ... 3 is a number and "3" is a string. They're not 
quite the same thing. So this works:

"abc" * 3 (yields the string "abcabcabc")

But this doesn't:

"abc" * "3" (produces a "type error")

Your $enterNumber variable refers to a string, but you can ask Ruby to 
treat it as a number by applying the "to integer" method, to_i.

print $total * $enterNumber.to_i



By the way, which of the fm's are you rtfm'ing? Have you run across the 
User's Guide yet?

Mark