From: Jamis Buck <jgb3@...>
Date: 2003-12-23T03:30:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Testing contents of string for known types

Carl Youngblood wrote:

> Is there a built-in way to test the contents of a string to try and 
> find a logical type of data that it might contain?  For example, say a 
> string contains "4.56".  It would be nice to have
>
> "4.56".inferred_type => Float
> "23".inferred_type => Fixnum
> "george".inferred_type => String
>

Something like this, perhaps?

    class String
      def inferred_type
        eval(self).class
      rescue
        String
      end
    end

    p "3.14".inferred_type
    p "15".inferred_type
    p "george".inferred_type

I'm not sure how robust this is, since it uses eval (if the string 
contains the name of a method of String, then the result you get back 
will be the class of whatever tha t method returns...).

-- 
Jamis Buck
jgb3@email.byu.edu

ruby -h | ruby -e 'a=[];readlines.join.scan(/-(.)\[e|Kk(\S*)|le.l(..)e|#!(\S*)/) {|r| a << r.compact.first };puts "\n>#{a.join(%q/ /)}<\n\n"'