Question

just started learning Rails and have managed to import a csv file into a database, but the price field in the csv has quotes and a comma like this: “560,000”

But if I make the price field as t.integer in the migration file, then add the data, the price gets imported as 560. So, how do I remove the quotes and the comma before importing it? thanks, Adam

edit: here’s the rake file:

require 'csv'    

task :csv_to_properties => [:environment] do 
  CSV.foreach("lib/assets/cbmb_sale.csv", :headers => true) do |row|

    Property.create!(row.to_hash)
  end
end

Answer 1

In your code example, assuming the price field is in row element 4:

CSV.foreach("lib/assets/cbmb_sale.csv", :headers => true) do |row|
  row[price=4].gsub!(/,/,'')
  Property.create!(row.to_hash)
end

The price=4 is just a handy way to document the index value of the price element, it creates a variable called price assigns the value 4 to it, then immediately uses it as the array index.

Since Property.create! is already taking care of the string to integer conversion, we can perform an in-place substitution for the regular expression that contains a comma /,/ for an empty string ''.