When converting a string in Ruby to and in using the value's to_i method it will do some interesting conversion.
Examples:
- '5' becomes 5 -- Cool
- 'I have 5' becomes 0 -- kind of a weird failure, 0 could be a perfectly fine conversion
- '5 is five' becomes 5 -- Really odd behavior, but the conversion is done until an incorrect character is encountered. After this the rest of the string is ignored. So
- '5 is 5' becomes 5
- '5,000' becomes 5
Where this is helpful so far is when someone is entering text through the command prompt. When a person enters text prompted from gets the new line added from the user pressing enter is included. So if a user enters 5, then the gets string contains '5\n'. In most languages this would cause and issue, but with how ruby does it's conversion of '5\n' becomes 5.

Comments