Ruby string with USD "money" converted to number

ruby-on-rails ruby currency
randombits picture randombits · Dec 10, 2013 · Viewed 14.1k times · Source

Is there currently a gem that's capable of taking strings, all in USD for this purpose, and converting them to a number? Some examples would be:

  • "$7,600" would turn into 7600
  • "5500" would turn into 5500

I know on the "5500" example I can just do "5500".to_i, but the spreadsheets being imported aren't consistent and some include commas and dollar signs while others do not. There a decent way of handling this across the board in Ruby?

I've tried something like money_string.scan(/\d/).join which seems to be fine, just worried I'll run into edge cases I haven't found yet, such as decimal places.

Answer

naikipl picture naikipl · Dec 10, 2013

Why not remove all non-digit characters before calling .to_i

Example:

"$7,600".gsub(/\D/,'').to_i

And for a floating point number:

"$7,600.90".gsub(/[^\d\.]/, '').to_f

Related questions

What is the best method of handling currency/money?

I'm working on a very basic shopping cart system. I have a table items that has a column price of type integer. I'm having trouble displaying the price value in my views for prices that include both Euros and cents. …

Read More
to_d to always return 2 decimals places in ruby

I'm dealing with currencies and I want to round down the number to 2 decimal places. Even if the number is 500.0, I would like it to be 500.00 to be consistent. When I do "500.00".to_d it converts it to 500.0. Whats a …

Read More
How to get a random number in Ruby

How do I generate a random number between 0 and n?

Read More