Safe integer parsing in Ruby

Question

I have a string, say \'123\', and I want to convert it to the integer 123.

I know you can simply do some_string.to_i, but that

Answer 1

Also be aware of the affects that the current accepted solution may have on parsing hex, octal, and binary numbers:

>> Integer('0x15')
# => 21  
>> Integer('0b10')
# => 2  
>> Integer('077')
# => 63

In Ruby numbers that start with 0x or 0X are hex, 0b or 0B are binary, and just 0 are octal. If this is not the desired behavior you may want to combine that with some of the other solutions that check if the string matches a pattern first. Like the /\d+/ regular expressions, etc.