Checking if a variable is an integer

Question

Does Rails 3 or Ruby have a built-in way to check if a variable is an integer?

For example,

1.is_an_int #=> true
\"dadadad@asdasd.net\".is_an_int          


        

Answer 1

I have had a similar issue before trying to determine if something is a string or any sort of number whatsoever. I have tried using a regular expression, but that is not reliable for my use case. Instead, you can check the variable's class to see if it is a descendant of the Numeric class.

if column.class < Numeric
  number_to_currency(column)
else
  column.html_safe
end

In this situation, you could also substitute for any of the Numeric descendants: BigDecimal, Date::Infinity, Integer, Fixnum, Float, Bignum, Rational, Complex