From: Paul Brannan <pbrannan@...>
Date: 2005-09-08T01:37:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Lexical Casts with Ruby

On Sun, Sep 04, 2005 at 12:16:26AM +0900, R??diger Sonderfeld wrote:
> Hello,
> I want to assign some values I recive in string form to attributes of a
> user specified class. The problem is that I have to lexical cast the
> strings into the required type. I can't use to_i or to_f because the attribute
> type can only be determined at runtime.
> 
> Is there a way for lexical casts between types in Ruby? Something like
> convert("10", Fixnum)
> => 10

In C++, boost::lexical_cast uses streams to convert the object to a
string and then from the string to the desired type.

It is easy to do the first part in ruby; all objects have a to_s method.

The second part is harder.  There is no uniform mechanism for converting
a string into an object.

Paul