I am trying to write a program that when a single letter is inputted, if it\'s in uppercase, leave it in uppercase and return it, and if it\'s in lowercase, then convert to
Sounds like you just need to convert to uppercase and don't need to bother with the if lowercase check at all, since applying #upcase to something that is already uppercase won't effect it.
For a single string you can use start_with? method as well.
user_input = gets.chomp
if user_input.start_with?(user_input.downcase)
user_input.upcase!
end
Just convert the string to upper case and compare it with the original
string == string.upcase
or for lowercase
string == string.downcase
Edit: as mentioned in the comments the solution above works with English letters only. If you need an international solution instead use
def upcase?(string)
!string[/[[:lower:]]/]
end
which uses a regular expressions to scan the string for lowercase letters and the negates the finding to tell whether the string is all uppercase.