I’m coming back to this project after letting it go for a while, and sure enough, the problem I was having when I put it down is still vexing me.

One script is intended to grab all of the play-by-play data from retrosheet.org. The files all have urls like this:

http://www.retrosheet.org/1957/1957al.zip

http://www.retrosheet.org/1957/1957nl.zip

http://www.retrosheet.org/1957/1957ml.zip

The snippet below is a simplified version of the code I’m using to build the urls. It’s intended to print the urls of each zip file for each league from 1957 to 2006:

year = 1957
leagues = ['al', 'nl', 'ml']leagues.each do |league|
  while year <= 2006
    url = "http://www.retrosheet.org/#{year}/#{year}#{league}.zip"
    puts url
    year += 1
  end
end

However, it doesn’t do that. It only generates the urls for the AL files, and I can’t get my brain around why.

I’ll be sure to add the solution when I figure it out, but for now I wanted to just document some of the struggles of a Ruby n00b.