In our rail application we do a lot of string conversions to other data types, including Boolean. Unfortunately, ruby does not provide a conversion method to_bool (which I find rather strange, to be honest).

Based a blog post by Chris Roos in October 2006, we developed a rails plugin that enables the “to_bool” conversion.

“to_bool” works on the strings “true” and “false” and any capitalisation of these, and on numbers, as well as on nil. Other strings raise an ArgumentError.

Examples are as follows:

'true'.to_bool #-> true 'TrUe'.to_bool #-> true true.to_bool #-> true 1.to_bool #-> true 5.to_bool #-> true -9.to_bool #-> true nil.to_bool #-> false 'false'.to_bool #-> false 'FaLsE'.to_bool #-> false false.to_bool #-> false 0.to_bool #-> false You can find the plugin here as a tarball. To install it, simply decompress the to_bool directory into your vendor/plugins directory.