exercism/ruby/roman-numerals

Roman Numerals

Write a function to convert from normal numbers to Roman Numerals.

The Romans were a clever bunch. They conquered most of Europe and ruled it for hundreds of years. They invented concrete and straight roads and even bikinis. One thing they never discovered though was the number zero. This made writing and dating extensive histories of their exploits slightly more challenging, but the system of numbers they came up with is still in use today. For example the BBC uses Roman numerals to date their programmes.

The Romans wrote numbers using letters - I, V, X, L, C, D, M. (notice these letters have lots of straight lines and are hence easy to hack into stone tablets).

 1  => I
10  => X
 7  => VII

There is no need to be able to convert numbers larger than about 3000. (The Romans themselves didn't tend to go any higher)

Wikipedia says: Modern Roman numerals ... are written by expressing each digit separately starting with the left most digit and skipping any digit with a value of zero.

To see this in practice, consider the example of 1990.

In Roman numerals 1990 is MCMXC:

1000=M 900=CM 90=XC

2008 is written as MMVIII:

2000=MM 8=VIII

See also: http://www.novaroma.org/via_romana/numbers.html

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For installation and learning resources, refer to the exercism help page.

For running the tests provided, you will need the Minitest gem. Open a terminal window and run the following command to install minitest:

gem install minitest

If you would like color output, you can require 'minitest/pride' in the test file, or note the alternative instruction, below, for running the test file.

Run the tests from the exercise directory using the following command:

ruby roman_numerals_test.rb

To include color from the command line:

ruby -r minitest/pride roman_numerals_test.rb

Source

The Roman Numeral Kata http://codingdojo.org/cgi-bin/index.pl?KataRomanNumerals

Submitting Incomplete Solutions

It's possible to submit an incomplete solution so you can see how others have completed the exercise.