String “true” and “false” to boolean

Question

I have a Rails application and I\'m using jQuery to query my search view in the background. There are fields q (search term), start_date, end

Answer 1

There isn't any built-in way to handle this (although actionpack might have a helper for that). I would advise something like this

def to_boolean(s)
  s and !!s.match(/^(true|t|yes|y|1)$/i)
end

# or (as Pavling pointed out)

def to_boolean(s)
  !!(s =~ /^(true|t|yes|y|1)$/i)
end

What works as well is to use 0 and non-0 instead of false/true literals:

def to_boolean(s)
  !s.to_i.zero?
end