Every once in a while there is a need to pass string representations of boolean in Rails. The framework intelligently handles this work for us developers and today I learned the method in ActiveRecord that does the job:

in Rails < 4.2: {% highlight ruby %} ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::Column.value_to_boolean('0') => false ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::Column.value_to_boolean('1') => true {% endhighlight %}

From Rails 4.2: {% highlight ruby %} ActiveRecord::Type::Boolean.new.type_cast_from_user('0') => false ActiveRecord::Type::Boolean.new.type_cast_from_user('1') => true {% endhighlight %}

Rails 5: {% highlight ruby %} ActiveRecord::Type::Boolean.new.deserialize('0') => false ActiveRecord::Type::Boolean.new.deserialize('1') => true {% endhighlight %}