title: Ruby - Strings & Symbols Questions
body: <p><strong>Context</strong>: just started learning Ruby, the code below is a part of a slightly longer program, but I only need some help with the first part, and I may not articulate my problem clearly enough, so apologies in advance</p>
  <p><strong>Question</strong>: I've marked the problem parts of the program. If I have a hash with strings and I want the if-else statement to identify user input, regardless of how a user enters the movie title (e.g. different spacing, capitalization, or without quotation marks) as the same as those in the hash and output the else statement, how would I go about doing that? Thank you</p>
  <pre class="lang-rb prettyprint-override"><code>movies = {
    &quot;Lord of the Rings&quot; =&gt; 4,     # &lt;= this
    Inception: 4, 
    &quot;Hurt Locker&quot; =&gt; 3.5,         # &lt;= this
    Mother: 4
  }
  puts &quot;What would you like to do?&quot;
  puts &quot;-- Type 'add' to add a movie.&quot;
  puts &quot;-- Type 'update' to update a movie.&quot;
  puts &quot;-- Type 'display' to display a movie.&quot;
  puts &quot;-- Type 'delete' to delete a movie.&quot;
  
  choice = gets.chomp
  
  case choice
  when &quot;add&quot;
    puts &quot;What movie would you like to add? &quot;
    title = gets.chomp
    if movies[title.to_sym].nil? 
      puts &quot;What rating does the movie have? &quot;
      rating = gets.chomp
      movies[title.to_sym] = rating.to_i
    else
      #                                         and this
      #                                                v
      puts &quot;That movie already exists! Its rating is #{movies[title.to_sym]}.&quot;
    end
  end
  </code></pre>