From: Ryan Leavengood <leavengood@...>
Date: 2007-04-04T23:29:36+09:00
Subject: Re: Problem Extracting Array Values

On 4/4/07, ChrisH <chris.hulan@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As you say, its stored as a String, and String defines [] to return
> the ASCII value of the character
> at the given index.  If you put 91.chr into IRB you'll see it is the
> '[' character.
>
> You need to convert your String into an actual array before you can
> access each element.
>
> Maybe:
> eval(@blocks)[0]

That is what I surmised as well. But in general it is a bad idea to be
evaling code from a database. Security and all that.

Dustin, why are you storing those values that way? Why not have a
normalized table with a row for each? In other words you create a
blocks table, define a Block model which belongs_to whatever model you
currently use the blocks column in, and then that model will have many
blocks. Then you could just do @model.blocks.each do |block| in your
view.

Ryan