Restart Ruby program internally

Question

I'm writing a very simple dungeon adventure game in Ruby (practice for a newb). I want to address the player by name throughout, so naturally I want to be sure that if a player passes an empty name to my Player initialize method if tells them they can't do that and then prompts them to retry.

class Player
    attr_accessor :name, :location

    def initialize(name)
        if name.empty? == false
            @name = name
        else
            puts "You did not enter your name! Try again, please"
            load 'game.rb'
        end
    end
end

The file name is 'game.rb' so I'm basically reloading the entire file here each time the player decides not to enter their name. Which is stupid...

It works, but in the worst way...I had to be 'clever' about where I exited the program so that the player would be insulated from the fact that I'm basically going all Inception on everyone and launching a game within a game every time the player starts a new game and neglects to enter their name. For instance, if they don't notice 3 times that they need to input their name because they're not paying attention, I effectively have 4 games running (the original, and the 3 the prompted by not entering their name) and they'd either need to end each of those games when they're tired of playing, or else I had to basically exit the whole thing hard at one keyword.

My question is this: is there a way to write my error "You did not enter..." exit the current game session, and relaunch the game? All I really want to do is ensure an empty string doesn't get passed to my initialize method, maybe by raising an exception, and then start over at the beginning of the script without having a game-within-a-game.

Here is a link to the full code for more insight: http://repl.it/8QY

Answer 1

It's hard to know without seeing the whole game structure, but your main file could look like

game_initialized = false
while ! game_initialized
  begin
    # here, initialize the game, including initialization
    game_initialized = true
  rescue NoNameError
    # do nothing, but it will restart the game
  end
end
# now play the game

And in your constructor, you add

class NoNameError < Exception
end

class Player
  attr_accessor :name, :location

  def initialize(name)
    if name.empty? == false
      @name = name
    else
      puts "You did not enter your name! Try again, please"
      raise NoNameError
    end
  end
end

That should get you going.

Answer 2

I think Vincent's answer is good, it certainly is more OO than mine but a simple approach would be to do something like this at game start:

print "Welcome!  "
in_name = ""
while true
  puts "What is your name?"
  in_name = gets.chomp
  in_name.empty? ? (puts "You must enter a name before continuing") : break
end

Example:

Welcome!  What is your name?

You must enter a name before continuing
What is your name?
Anthony

Answer 3

If you want your logic to be in Player, you can try something like this:

class Player
  attr_accessor :name, :location

  def initialize(name)
    @name = keep_asking_for_name_if_not_already_entered(name)
  end

  def keep_asking_for_name_if_not_already_entered(name)
    return name unless name.empty?
    loop do
      puts 'You did not enter your name! Enter a name, please:'
      name = gets.chomp
      break(name) unless name.empty?
    end
  end
end