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_date and internal. The internal field is a checkbox and I'm using the is(:checked) method to build the url that is queried:

$.getScript(document.URL + "?q=" + $("#search_q").val() + "&start_date=" + $("#search_start_date").val() + "&end_date=" + $("#search_end_date").val() + "&internal=" + $("#search_internal").is(':checked'));

Now my problem is in params[:internal] because there is a string either containing "true" or "false" and I need to cast it to boolean. Of course I can do it like this:

def to_boolean(str)
     return true if str=="true"
     return false if str=="false"
     return nil
end

But I think there must be a more Ruby'ish way to deal with this problem! Isn't there...?

Answer 1

As far as i know there is no built in way of casting strings to booleans, but if your strings only consist of 'true' and 'false' you could shorten your method to the following:

def to_boolean(str)
  str == 'true'
end