From: Navindra Umanee <navindra@...>
Date: 2005-03-14T04:10:33+09:00
Subject: Re: how do you duck-type something to String, so String believes you?

Sam Roberts <sroberts@uniserve.com> wrote:
> I can give something a #to_str, which should be an indication that it is
> duck-type compat to a String (as opposed to #to_s, which converts
> something to a String).

String is also strongly-typed in C as T_STRING, so Ruby duck-typing is
not going to save you here.  Ruby is riddled with that sort of thing,
probably for efficiency and implementation reasons.

What you can do is override String.== to take this into consideration.

class String
        alias :_equals :==
        def ==(o)
                _equals(o.to_s)
        end
end

Cheers,
Navin.