Question

Can someone tell me why in the world this doesn’t work? The code below is the entire contents of the file prog.rb

class String
    def to_b
        return true if self == "true"
        false
    end
end

Here is the error:

path/prog.rb:1: syntax error, unexpected keyword_def, expecting
<' or ';' or '\n'
             return true if self =...
                ^

There are no bad characters in the file and I’m using Ruby 1.9.3. The code is tested in IRB and found to work.

Is this a bug?

Thanks

Answer 1

My guess is that there’s an issue with how your editor is saving carriage returns. It’s saying it expected a < or ; or \n — which means it didn’t detect the \n (carriage return) that should have been present at the end of the class String line.

Check your editor’s carriage return settings and re-save the file.