Question

In a Ruby on Rails app, we have some details which are stored as an Integer, but are being interpreted as hex when we’re trying to convert to string.

e.g.

> 0123.to_s
=> 83

Is there a way of treating the value as an integer, even though it’s in a format that Ruby sees as hex. If there isn’t we’ll just change the database field to varchar!

Answer 1

Actually, that’s not hexadecimal, that’s octal. If you don’t want this behavior, don’t put a leading zero on your integer literals in code:

irb(main):001:0> 0123         # octal literal
#=> 83

irb(main):002:0> 0x123        # hex literal
#=> 291

irb(main):003:0> 123          # base-10 literal
#=> 123

irb(main):004:0> "0123".to_i  # Converting string to int defaults to base 10
#=> 123

If the leading zero is appearing because you’re using Ruby to create aligned Ruby code using printf, like so:

irb(main):008:0> "%04i" % 123
#=> "0123"

…then instead use spaces for padding rather than zeros:

irb(main):009:0> "%4i" % 123
#=> "  123"