Searching a Hash

I'm trying to complete this Codewars Challenge and I'm confused as to where I'm going wrong. Could someone please give me a hand?

The question provides a "database" of translations for Welcome, and the instructions say:

> - Think of a way to store the languages as a database (eg an object). The languages are listed below so you can copy and paste!
> - Write a 'welcome' function that takes a parameter 'language' (always a string), and returns a greeting - if you have it in your database. It should default to English if the language is not in the database, or in the event of an invalid input.

My attempt:

def greet(language)
  
  greeting = {  'english'=>'Welcome',
    'czech'=>'Vitejte',
    'danish'=>'Velkomst',
    'dutch'=>'Welkom',
    'estonian'=>'Tere tulemast',
    'finnish'=>'Tervetuloa',
    'flemish'=>'Welgekomen',
    'french'=>'Bienvenue',
    'german'=>'Willkommen',
    'irish'=>'Failte',
    'italian'=>'Benvenuto',
    'latvian'=>'Gaidits',
    'lithuanian'=>'Laukiamas',
    'polish'=>'Witamy',
    'spanish'=>'Bienvenido',
    'swedish'=>'Valkommen',
    'welsh'=>'Croeso'
  }

    greeting.key?(language) ? greeting.each { |k, v| return v if language == k } : 'IP_ADDRESS_INVALID'

end

To my eyes when I run my code through the IDE it seems to be working as per request but I guess I must be wrong somehow.

It's telling me it :

> Expected: "Laukiamas", instead got: "Welcome"

But when I type:

 p greet("lithuanian")

I get Laukiamas.

You can provide you greeting hash with a default value. It is as simple as

greeting.default = "Welcome"

This enhanced hash does all the work for you. Just look up the key; when it is not there you'll get "Welcome".

Preface

First of all, please don't post links to exercises or homework questions. Quote them in your original question to avoid link rot or additional create work for people trying to help you out.

Understanding the Problem Defined by the Linked Question

Secondly, you're misunderstanding the core question. The requirement is basically to return the Hash value for a given language key if the key exists in the Hash. If it doesn't, then return the value of the 'english' key instead. Implicit in the exercise is to understand the various types of improper inputs that would fail to find a matching key; the solution below addresses most of them, and will work even if your Ruby has frozen strings enabled.

A Working Solution

There are lots of ways to do this, but here's a simple example that will handle invalid keys, nil as a language argument, and abstract away capitalization as a potential issue.

DEFAULT_LANG = 'english'
TRANSLATIONS = { 
    'english'    => 'Welcome',
    'czech'      => 'Vitejte',
    'danish'     => 'Velkomst',
    'dutch'      => 'Welkom',
    'estonian'   => 'Tere tulemast',
    'finnish'    => 'Tervetuloa',
    'flemish'    => 'Welgekomen',
    'french'     => 'Bienvenue',
    'german'     => 'Willkommen',
    'irish'      => 'Failte',
    'italian'    => 'Benvenuto',
    'latvian'    => 'Gaidits',
    'lithuanian' => 'Laukiamas',
    'polish'     => 'Witamy',
    'spanish'    => 'Bienvenido',
    'swedish'    => 'Valkommen',
    'welsh'      => 'Croeso'
}

# Return a translation of "Welcome" into the language
# passed as an argument.
#
# @param language [String, #to_s] any object that can
#   be coerced into a String, and therefore to 
#   String#downcase
# @return [String] a translation of "Welcome" or the
#   string-literal +Welcome+ if no translation found
def greet language
  language = language.to_s.downcase
  TRANSLATIONS.fetch language, TRANSLATIONS[DEFAULT_LANG]
end

# Everything in the following Array of examples except
# +Spanish+ should return the Hash value for +english+.                                                                                               
['Spanish', 'Español', 123, nil].map { greet(_1) }

This will correctly return:

> #=> ["Bienvenido", "Welcome", "Welcome", "Welcome"]

because only Spanish (when lower-cased) will match any of the keys currently defined in the TRANSLATIONS Hash. All the rest will use the default value defined for the exercise.

Test Results

Since there are some RSpec tests included with the linked question:

describe "Welcome! Translation" do
  it "should translate input" do
    Test.assert_equals(greet('english'), 'Welcome', "It didn't work out this time, keep trying!");
    Test.assert_equals(greet('dutch'), 'Welkom', "It didn't work out this time, keep trying!");
    Test.assert_equals(greet('IP_ADDRESS_INVALID'), 'Welcome', "It didn't work out this time, keep trying!")
  end
end

The code provided not only passes the provided tests, but it also passes a number of other edge cases not defined in the unit tests. When run against the defined tests, the code above passes cleanly:

If this is homework, then you might want to create additional tests to cover all the various edge cases. You might also choose to refactor to less idiomatic code if you want more explanatory variables, more explicit intermediate conversions, or more explicit key handling. The point of good code is to be readable, so be as explicit in your code and as thorough in your tests as you need to be in order to make debugging easier.